The journalist was freed three months after being abducted in an attack that left her translator dead.
Carroll, 28, was dropped off near the Iraqi Islamic Party offices. She walked inside, and people there called American officials, Iraqi police said.
“I was treated well, but I don’t know why I was kidnapped,” Carroll said in a brief interview on Baghdad television.
I’m going to take a wild guess and say that it was for a couple of reasons. A) she’s an American; and B) she wrote for the Christian Science Monitor. It’s a damned good paper, but the name alone is trouble in a region where the fundamentalist imams are instituting sharia law and consolidating control.
But this is one woman with huevos:
Carroll went to the Middle East in 2002 after being laid off from a newspaper job. She had long dreamed of covering a war.
In American Journalism Review last year, Carroll wrote that she moved to Jordan in late 2002, six months before the war started, “to learn as much about the region as possible before the fighting began.”
“There was bound to be plenty of parachute journalism once the war started, and I didn’t want to be a part of that,” she wrote.
Carroll has had work from Iraq published in the Monitor, AJR, U.S. News & World Report, ANSA and other publications. She has been interviewed often on National Public Radio.
Congratulations, Jill.