That didn’t protect her from being kidnapped on Jan. 7, 2006.
A freelancer for The Christian Science Monitor at the time, Carroll spent 82 days in captivity, moving frequently from one house to another. Her captors were allied with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian who led Al Qaeda in Iraq and was notorious for personally beheading captives. He died in a U.S. air strike June 7, 2006.
Carroll was freed March 30 and returned to the United States April 2. She wrote an 11-part series for the Monitor in August. Carroll was chosen as one of four fellows at the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University for the fall 2006 semester. She will research the decline of foreign bureaus in the newspaper industry.
Carroll, 28, left a reporting assistant job at The Wall Street Journal in August 2002 to report for the English-language Jordan Times in Amman. She studied Arabic there for a year and in March 2003 went to Iraq as a freelancer.
“Freelance journalism is a tough business everywhere,” she wrote in the Monitor series. “But I didn’t want to sit in a cubicle in the US and write, as I had, about the Department of Agriculture’s food pyramid. Here I was living my dream of being a foreign correspondent – even if that meant sometimes living in a hotel so seedy it was best to buy your own sheets.”
Carroll became a stringer for the Italian news agency ANSA, USA Today and U.S. News & World Report.
Los Angeles Times staff writer Borzou Daragahi met her in Baghdad, in “the short-lived golden era of journalism in post-invasion Iraq,” he said. They stayed at neighboring budget hotels, coped with heat, humidity and street stench and relished the story. “Iraq during those first few months was a place bursting with everything from new political parties to new artistic innovations to new culinary delights,” Daragahi said.
As an insurgency began to unfold, however, euphoria gave way to fear. Bombs hit embassies and international organizations, foreigners were kidnapped and some were beheaded, with a video shown on TV. The hundreds of journalists who had flooded into Iraq began a mass exodus. Freelancers, who had no institutional base and no armored cars for security, were particularly vulnerable. Many left.
Carroll stayed put, committed to covering the lives of Iraqis and American soldiers. At the time of her kidnapping, she was one of a handful of Western reporters left in Baghdad.
By 2005, Carroll was writing solely for The Christian Science Monitor. She and her translator, Alan Enwiya, who had been her partner for two years, were working on an in-depth look at the Sunnis and their implicit support for the insurgents.
The day of the kidnapping, they went to a Sunni neighborhood for a scheduled interview with a top Sunni politician. After a delay, an aide told them he was tied up and they should come back in two hours. Carroll and Enwiya returned to their car. The Monitor’s veteran driver, Adnan Abbas, was pulling away when a large truck backed out of a driveway and blocked their path.
Men who had ostensibly been guiding the truck pivoted toward Carroll’s car, then “trained pistols on us and briskly approached the car,” Carroll wrote. Enwiya and Abbas immediately put their hands up. “It was a routine we had become familiar with in Baghdad, where private security details often brandish weapons to clear a path for their clients,” she wrote. “But unlike the previous times, the men didn’t lower their weapons – and they kept advancing.” As Abbas and Enwiya began to get out of the car, the gunmen ran at them. Abbas escaped, Enwiya was shot and killed on the spot. Carroll was shoved back inside as the gunman commandeered the car and sped away. “ ‘Jihad! Jihad! Jihad!’ my abductors shouted, excited and joyful,” Carroll recalled.
The U.S. military came close to finding her that same night, after a tip from an Iraqi civilian. That spooked Carroll’s captors. One demanded to know if she had a cell phone hidden in her hair. She tore off her head scarf and he searched her scalp. The next day, the leader of the kidnapping team, whom she later learned was a close ally of Zarqawi, asked if she had something in her body that would send a signal to her government.
A pattern was set early in her captivity. “I was moved often. They provided me meals that Iraqis would think fit for guests, as well as small luxuries such as expensive toiletries,” she wrote. “Yet I was a prisoner. My captors would unexpectedly explode with bitter accusations that I was a spy, or Jewish, or hiding a homing device.”
For the first three weeks, Carroll stayed in what appeared to be homes of the kidnappers. That carried intrinsic ironies. She watched TV with their families, cuddled their toddlers, and helped prepare meals with their wives.
One night as dinner was being prepared, the kidnapper she knew as Abu Ali "proudly declared that his wife wanted to die…. (She) wants to be a martyr. She wants to drive a car bomb!” He added that “of course, she’d have to wait, since she was now four months pregnant. It is forbidden in Islam to kill a fetus at that age.” As he spoke, the couple’s three small children played around their feet.
“I was still unused to captivity, still learning the boundaries, both physical and mental, that my kidnappers had imposed. I didn’t want to offend. But I was shocked at the talk of a mother’s suicide…”
“Later, I was told that this was the only way women could be part of the mujahideen. The men could have the glory of fighting in battle. Women got to blow themselves up.”
After big silver platters of food were carried to the insurgents closeted in the sitting room, Carroll took questions from their wives, in the kitchen. “Then the dinner platters returned, with the food ravaged – rice everywhere, bones with the chicken chewed off, nothing left but scraps, really. And the women sat and began to eat the scraps. I couldn’t believe it! After all the time they’d spent preparing the meal, they got leftovers,” she said. “But I sat down with them. And, as I would often do with women over the next three months, I ate from the remains of the communal stew.”
Carroll hid her knowledge of Arabic and pretended to be a fast learner as they taught her the language. She never revealed she had spent five weeks embedded with the U.S. Marines the year before.
She also feigned interest when they tried to convert her to Islam. “The more I let my captors teach me, the more they expected me to convert. After a few weeks, the question was always ‘Why haven’t you come to Islam yet?’” She finally told Abu Ali’s wife, Um Ali, that she probably wasn’t going to convert after all. The woman was angry but also told Carroll “we are afraid for you and don’t want you to go to hell… We are afraid that we’ll see you (on Judgment Day) and you’ll say ‘Why didn’t you save me?’”
The insurgents were convinced they had the home-court advantage, Carroll said.
A top leader “told me more than once: “I can go out, plant my bomb, and go back and have a homemade dinner with my wife. What are American soldiers going to do? They go back (to their base) and do not have good food or get to see their family.’”
They showed off DVDs of their war, of roadside bombs blowing up American Humvees. “By their count, they were killing dozens or even hundreds of soldiers a day. They estimated that Al Qaeda in Iraq had killed at least 40,000 U.S. soldiers.” As she watched them, “I felt the insurgents were sending me a message. They hate Americans so much, they’re proud of these attacks. It’s normal to them.”
Their passion for killing Americans began to take second place to their conflict with Shias in late February, however. Sectarian violence escalated after a famed Shiite mosque in Samarra was blown up. A kidnapper told her that “now our No. 1 enemy are the Shias. Americans are No. 2.”
What prompted the kidnapers to release Carroll remains unclear. She was required to make nearly a dozen videotaped statements, four of which were broadcast. In the videos, Carroll was heavily coached and often purposefully made to look disheveled.
“I was to say that they were mujahideen fighting to defend their country, that they wanted women freed from Abu Ghraib prison, and the US military, particularly the Marines, were killing and arresting their women and destroying their houses. And I must cry, on cue,” she wrote.
But Carroll says she has no regrets about going to Iraq. She did what she always had wanted to do: foreign reporting. She has returned to Egypt since her release. And, she says, “What happened to me is not the whole Middle East.”