‘Good Day’ in Iraq for Freed U.S. Journalist

The quaking woman in the abaya had tears in her eyes and spoke English -- the first sign to a startled receptionist that this visitor was different from the usual grieving widow or mother so common in this violent country.

When she finally managed to explain, in broken Arabic, that she was Jill Carroll, it was not sympathy but a rare outburst of joy she sparked.

The idealistic American freelance correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, kidnapped by gunmen nearly three months ago, had been released unharmed Thursday, a splash of good news during one of post-invasion Iraq’s bleakest stretches.

“I was treated very well,” said Carroll, 28, smiling and seemingly in good health and spirits, in an interview broadcast on the television channel of the Iraqi Islamic Party, the country’s main Sunni Arab political organization.

“They never hit me,” she said, wearing a gray and beige head scarf and a light blue gown. “They never even threatened to hit me. I’m just happy to be free and want to be with my family.”

Carroll’s abduction and her disturbing videotaped messages, released by her abductors to Arabic-language satellite channels, had been emblematic of Iraq’s continuing lawlessness and violence.

Carroll was held for 82 days by the little-known kidnappers, who demanded that Iraqi and U.S. officials free all female prisoners as a precondition for her release. In the last footage of her, aired Feb. 9 on a Kuwaiti station, Carroll urged negotiators to quickly meet the kidnappers’ demands. The Monitor said Carroll’s family and the paper pursued half a dozen false leads during the ordeal.

Kidnappings, sometimes for ransom and other times as acts of political terrorism, have become a daily hazard in Iraq. Thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of foreign civilians have been seized, their bodies occasionally showing up in sewage ditches days later.

The perpetrators are shadowy groups suspected of having ties to official security organs as well as the Sunni Arab-led insurgency. This month, Tom Fox, an American activist kidnapped in November, was found dead in Baghdad. His three British and Canadian colleagues who were also abducted were later rescued by British-led forces.

Carroll said she was treated well by her captors, who killed her interpreter, Allan Enwiyah, 32, during the Jan. 7 abduction, which occurred as she left the office of a Sunni politician in Baghdad.

In the interview on the Iraqi Islamic Party’s Baghdad TV channel, Carroll said she was given good food, kept in a room with a shower and was allowed to read a newspaper and watch television once, and did not know where in Iraq she was being held.

Her freedom came as a surprise, she said.

“They just came to me and said, ‘We’re going,’ ” she said on television. “They didn’t tell me what was going on.”

The kidnappers apparently drove Carroll to western Baghdad shortly after noon and dropped her off, pointing her to a branch office of the Iraqi Islamic Party in Amiriya, a volatile district known as a haven for insurgents.

They warned her not to talk with Americans or go to the Green Zone because it was infiltrated by insurgents, adding she might be killed if she cooperated with Americans, according to an account on the Monitor’s website.

Wearing an all-covering traditional robe, Carroll walked up to the receptionist and handed over a note explaining who she was, party officials said.

Weeping and trembling, the Michigan native asked for help in broken Arabic.

“She looked to me as if she was happy but afraid at the same time,” said one party official in Amiriya, who asked that his name not be published. “All that I understood from her was that she wanted to go to her family.”

Party officials summoned a convoy of guards and armored vehicles to take her to the party’s central Baghdad headquarters, where she calmed down, contacted her family and friends abroad and in Baghdad.

Carroll then took part in the Baghdad TV interview before she was handed over to U.S. forces.

Reporters for the Washington Post, for whom Carroll freelanced early in the war, showed up at the party office, where they wept and hugged. Carroll borrowed a cellphone from a Sunni politician, waking up her twin sister, Katie, her father and her mother, one after the other, the Post reported. “It’s Jill,” she said. “I’m fine, and I’m free.”

According to the Post’s account, Carroll received only sporadic news from the outside world during her captivity. She was shocked by the heavy news coverage of her kidnapping and the publicity surrounding her case, including the display of a poster of her from Rome’s city hall.

She said she was surprised that Iraqi politicians elected to office three weeks before her capture had yet to form a government.

Carroll was told that the Baghdad TV interview she did was for internal party uses only and didn’t know it would be broadcast, the Monitor reported. Iraqi Islamic Party officials could be seen handing gifts to a smiling Carroll in the television footage.

Mindful of her kidnappers’ warnings, she agreed to go to the U.S.-protected Green Zone only after another Monitor reporter convinced her that it was the best option, the newspaper said.

She began to cry when the subject of her slain interpreter was raised, the Monitor said.

By Thursday evening, Carroll was inside the Green Zone, Baghdad’s administrative headquarters, getting unspecified medical attention as she waited to leave the country.

“This is a good day,” U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who met with Carroll after her release, told reporters. “She is safe, she is free and she appears in good health and great spirits.”

Carroll’s abduction, by a group calling itself the Revenge Brigades, proved a lingering embarrassment for Sunni politicians negotiating with more powerful Shiite rivals for positions of power in the government talks.

In the U.S., family members and employers expressed relief at Carroll’s release. Her father, Jim, told the Associated Press that he was “thrilled and relieved.”

“Our hearts are full,” said a statement by Carroll’s family posted on the website of the Christian Science Monitor. “We are elated by Jill’s safe release.”

Asked about the news while at a conference in Cancun, Mexico, President Bush told reporters, “I’m really grateful she was released and thank those who worked hard for her release, and we’re glad she’s alive.”

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice expressed “delight” at the news.

“This is something that people across the world have worked for and prayed for,” she said during a visit to Berlin.

Meanwhile, Iraq’s violence, often overlaid with sectarian tensions between the country’s majority Shiite Muslims and minority Sunni Arabs, continued.

At a media briefing Thursday, U.S. Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch told reporters that the average number of Iraqi casualties in the weeks since Feb. 11 had risen to 75 dead and wounded a day, higher than at any point over the last two years.

The military reported the death of a U.S. soldier in Fallouja of injuries sustained in combat Tuesday.

Several midmorning explosions rattled the capital. A car bomb targeting the convoy of a police commando leader with the Shiite-led Interior Ministry injured five of his guards. Another car bomb in front of a restaurant in northeastern Baghdad left one person dead and nine injured.

Roadside bombs targeting Iraqi police convoys and U.S. forces killed at least one and injured nine. In Baghdad’s Shiite Sadr City neighborhood, gunmen kidnapped four police officers from their car.

At least half a dozen mortar rounds struck different parts of the city, killing at least three civilians and injuring six.

Gunmen assassinated a well-known soccer player as he practiced. Manar Mudhafar Abdul Jabbar was a member of the Zawra club, among Iraq’s most famous teams.

Salam Jabar, a member of the Islamic Dawa Party of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari, was assassinated in the Jamiya neighborhood in northern Baghdad.

Jabar was also a prominent businessman, and his killing may be linked to a series of attacks on Iraqi merchants and businesses.

Police said gunmen targeted at least three bakeries in troubled sections of Baghdad, killing at least five bakers and injuring at least three. Most of the victims were Shiites, police said.

Gunmen opened fire on a group of Iraqis lining up for their monthly food rations in Dora, injuring four civilians. The district of southern Baghdad is a target of frequent sectarian attacks.

Qais Abdul Kareem, a high-level Ministry of Industry official kidnapped Wednesday evening, was found dead in the middle-class Zayona district.

The body of Abdul Qader Hussein, a shopkeeper in the mixed Sunni-Shiite Sadiya neighborhood, was found with signs of torture.

The bodies of two unidentified men, both handcuffed and bearing signs of torture, were found in western Baghdad.

A roadside bomb in the city of Kirkuk, claimed by Iraq’s Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen minority, killed one police officer and injured four.

Times staff writers John Johnson Jr. and Raheem Salman and special correspondent Asmaa Waguih contributed to this report.