Journalist Jill Carroll Released in Iraq
By Jonathan Finer and Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, March 30, 2006; 11:18 AM
BAGHDAD, March 30 — American journalist Jill Carroll, abducted in early January by gunmen in Baghdad, was released to a Sunni Arab political party in the capital Thursday morning after 82 days in captivity.
“I was treated very well. That’s important people know that,” she said in an interview broadcast by the Iraqi Islamic Party. “They never said they would hit me, never threatened me in any way. I was just happy to be free, and I want to be with my family.”
President Bush, on a visit to Cancun, Mexico, said, “I’m really grateful she was released and thank those who worked hard for her release, and we’re glad she’s alive.”
Carroll, 28, a freelance reporter working for the Christian Science Monitor, was brought to party headquarters just after 1 p.m. local time (5 a.m. EST) and was able to borrow a phone from a party member and speak with her parents and her twin sister. Party officials contacted a Washington Post reporter, who drove to the office and met with her.
While Carroll was inside the party compound, U.S. military vehicles arrived, some remaining outside to provide security, others entering the main gate. She later departed with a military convoy.
When she reached Baghdad’s Green Zone, she met with U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. “This is a good day. I just came from meeting with Jill Carroll,” he said. “She is safe, she is free and she appears in good health and in great spirits.”
He thanked Iraqi politicians who had lobbied for her release and the Iraqi Islamic Party, specifically. The United States did not make any agreement with Carroll’s captors or pay any ransom, he said.
Carroll is anxious to see her family, he added, and the U.S. Embassy will help her get home as soon as possible.
Clad in a light gray-and-blue headscarf and dress, Carroll said she did not know where she had been held captive, or why her kidnappers decided to release her.
“I don’t know what happened,” she said in the interview, which was first broadcast by the Iraqi Islamic Party’s Baghdad television station and later shown around the world. “They just came to me and said, ‘Okay, we’re letting you go now.’ ” She declined to describe her captivity in detail, but said the lack of freedom and the uncertainty were hard to bear. “It was difficult, because I didn’t — I didn’t know what would happen to me,” she said.
The young journalist’s father, Jim Carroll, spoke to reporters from the porch of the family’s home in Chapel Hill, N.C.
“Obviously, we are thrilled and relieved that she has been released,” he said, according to the Associated Press. “We want to thank all that have supported and prayed for her. We want to especially thank the Christian Science Monitor, who did so much work to keep her image alive in Iraq.”
Tariq al-Hashimi, the party’s secretary general, said in a telephone call at 12:30 p.m. local time that “unknown people” released Carroll to the Iraqi Islamic Party’s branch office in Amariyah, in the western part of Baghdad. The party then transported her by armed convoy to its headquarters in the Yarmouk district.
At about the same time, The Washington Post’s Baghdad bureau received a telephone call from Hashimi, who told a correspondent he had just spoken with Carroll.
“She has been released by unknown people to the Islamic Party office in Al Amariyah,” Hashimi said. “I have sent armored cars to bring her to the headquarters. She requested me to talk to you and inform you directly and will be here within half an hour. Will you come here? She is okay, she is safe. She is more or less scared. I told her to calm down and we would take care of her.”
Carroll said she spent her days sitting in a small, well-furnished room, its lone window made opaque by curtains and frosted glass. She said she was fed well and allowed to shower whenever she wanted, but was given almost no information from the outside world.
“They would come, bring me my food, I would eat, it was fine,” Carroll said. “If I had to take a shower, I would walk two feet to the next door, take a shower, go to the bathroom and come back.”
She said she watched television only once, and was brought a newspaper one time. No noise penetrated the room from the outside, and she did not know whether she was held near Baghdad or elsewhere.
After the interview, Hashimi was shown presenting Carroll with gifts: a plaque bearing the party’s emblem and a boxed copy of the Koran.
“What you have received today from the Iraqi Islamic Party is exactly the teachings of the Koran,” Hashimi said, smiling. Carroll thanked him and said the copy of the Koran was beautiful.
David Cook, the Washington bureau chief for the Christian Science Monitor, said he learned of Carroll’s release on his way into work when he received a call from her father, who dialed Cook’s cell phone at 6:10 a.m.
“Frankly, when I saw it, I thought, ‘Oh, some reporter must be bothering Jim.’ Because I’m the one who’s supposed to chase the reporters away,” Cook said later. “And then he told me what was happening, and it was wonderful. It was just stunning.”
Carroll was kidnapped Jan. 7, after arriving for an interview with Sunni politician Adnan Dulaimi in the western Baghdad neighborhood of Adil. When she left his office after Dulaimi did not show up, her car was attacked by gunmen who took her hostage. Her translator, Allan Anwiya, 29, was killed in the ambush, while her driver escaped.
In a video aired Jan. 17 on the al-Jazeera satellite network, Carroll’s captors threatened to kill her in 72 hours unless all female prisoners in U.S. detention facilities in Iraq were released. She was shown crying and clad in a black headscarf in a second video aired without sound on Jan. 30 by a group calling itself the Vengeance Brigade.
Carroll was last seen in a Feb. 9 video broadcast on Kuwaiti television station Al-Rai. In a calm voice she asked her supporters to do whatever was necessary to gain her release and her captors gave a Feb. 26 deadline for their demands to be met.
Speaking at a news conference in Berlin, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Carroll’s release “is something that people across the world have worked for and prayed for.”
Her release followed a comprehensive media campaign by family members, religious and political leaders in Iraq and around the world and the Boston-based Monitor. Her parents made regular appearances on English and Arabic-language television programs and her twin sister Katie said on television Wednesday night, “We would be grateful for any new sign that Jill is well.”
Kidnappings of Westerners in Iraq have grown more common in recent months. One week ago, British and U.S. soldiers freed three members of the Chicago-based advocacy group Christian Peacemaker Teams who had been abducted in late November. A fourth member of the group who was kidnapped then, Tom Fox, of Clear Brook, Va., was shot dead and dumped on a Baghdad street in early March.