Two Iraqi employees with the US embassy in Baghdad have disappeared the State Department announced on Thursday, raising suspicions that they have been kidnapped.

"There are two local national employees of the embassy in Baghdad who are missing. Their whereabouts, at this point, are unknown," U.S. State Department spokesman Tom Casey told reporters in Washington.

"Embassy officials as well as folks in the Iraqi security forces and MNF-I are trying to determine exactly what's happened to them," Casey added.

Reuters reports that US officials, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the case, said that after the husband went missing late last week his wife went to look for him and then she, too, appeared to have been abducted.

One official described the two as "missing and apparently kidnapped."