‘Withdraw or we’ll behead’

A banner in the background named his captors as Jama’at Al-Tawhid and Jihad, the group led by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian accused of links to Al Qaeda. ‘‘Please get out of here,’’ Kim begged, referring to South Korean troops already in Iraq. ‘‘I don’t want to die.’’

Kim, an Arabic speaker and Evangelical Christian who has worked in Iraq for a year as a translator for a Korean firm supplying goods to the US military, was seized in Falluja on June 17, the day before Seoul announced its troop plan.

‘‘We ask you to withdraw your forces from our land and not to send any more troops, and if not we’ll send you this Korean’s head,” one of a group of masked men standing around the terrified South Korean said. The group said Seoul had 24 hours to comply.

In Ramadi, four US soldiers were killed by insurgents, witnesses said.

Meanwhile, South Korean military medics in southern iraq suspended free medical treatment to Iraqi patients following the kidnapping. Service was temporarily ended because of security concerns, according to Major Chun Heung-Soo, a ministry spokesman in Seoul. —(Reuters)