The two men were released overnight near a Turkish hospital building in the southern oil city of Basra, local officials said Wednesday.

"They are in good health. They are saying the other 16 are also in good health," the Turkish ambassador to Iraq, Faruk Kaymakci, said.

Turkish media identified the freed men as Necdet Yilmaz and Ercan Ozpilavci. They were among 18 employees of Turkish construction company Nurol Insaat, taken from Baghdad's Shiite-dominated Sadr City suburb on September 2.

Last week, the hostages appeared in a video from a previously unknown militant group presenting itself as Shiite. In the clip, the militants threatened to attack Turkish interests if their demands for Turkey to halt the flow of militants into Iraq and to order rebel forces to stop besieging Shiite villages in Syria weren't met. The group also demanded Turkey stop the flow of "stolen oil from Kurdistan through Turkish territory."

Iraq's top cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, condemned the kidnapping of the workers, who had been building a football stadium complex (pictured above) at the time they were abducted.

"We demand the release of the kidnapped men and the end of such practices, which harm the image of Islam" in general and Shiites in particular, Sistani's office said in a statement.

Dozens of Turkish citizens in Iraq have been taken hostage and then released by the "Islamic State" (IS) militant group, which overran large parts of the country last year. In one instance, IS captured 46 Turkish citizens in Mosul in 2014 and kept them in captivity for more than three months. Sadr City, however, where the 18 were kidnapped, is a stronghold of pro-government Shiite paramilitary forces battling the Sunni Muslim IS.

Shiite volunteer forces, many of them linked to pro-Iranian political factions, have played a key role in halting the militant group's advance. However, some of these militias have checkered human rights records, and have been accused of acting with impunity and carrying out abuses against Sunni Muslims.

nm/ls (Reuters, AFP, AP, dpa)