New York Times

By ANDREW JACOBS and SIMON ROMERO

Published: April 14, 2026

They were driven by the promise of six-figure salaries or a powerful sense of patriotism. For others, the decision to sign up for a job in the cauldron of Iraq was motivated by desire to help ordinary Iraqis improve their lives. Among the tens of thousands of American citizens working in Iraq, few could have imagined how dangerous their jobs would become.

But in the last two weeks, many of the simplest tasks have carried extraordinary danger, as civilian workers have become targets of kidnappings and murder. Yesterday, there were reports that bodies were found mutilated in a shallow grave but the findings could not be confirmed. The news came just days after seven civilians working for the Halliburton Company of Houston and two soldiers disappeared in an ambush near that site last Friday.

There are no concrete figures on the number of civilians who have been killed or wounded in Iraq, but Halliburton has acknowledged that 30 of its employees and contractors have died since the war began last year. Several workers from the United States and other countries were still missing last night — like Thomas Hamill, a former dairy farmer who worked for Halliburton as a fuel truck driver and was captured last week on a highway outside Baghdad

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