Posted on 08/13/2006 5:09:50 PM PDT by Aussie Dasher
CERTAIN she would be murdered by the men who kidnapped her on a Baghdad street and fatally shot her translator, American journalist Jill Carroll begged her captors at one point to use a gun to end her life rather than a knife.
"Promise me you will use this gun to kill me by your own hand. I don't want that knife, I don't want the knife, use the gun," Carroll remembered crying hysterically to the Iraqi man who was watching her with a 9mm pistol at his side.
For the first time since she returned to the United States in April, Carroll has described her chilling, 82-day experience as a hostage in Iraq.
The Christian Science Monitor, the newspaper for which Carroll reported from Baghdad and now works as an editor in Boston, published the first installment of her 11-part series overnight on the newspaper's website.
Carroll, who was snatched on January 7 after trying to interview a Sunni politician, described how a sunny Saturday morning turned deadly as a group of men pointed their pistols at her and gunned down her friend and translator Alan Enwiya.
The men surrounded the 28-year-old reporter, shouted "Jihad! Jihad! Jihad!" and sped away on Baghdad's main road, according to the account.
Carroll wrote she was later grilled about how many American reporters lived in Baghdad and accused of working with US intelligence agents.
When Carroll asked her captors to shoot her instead of killing her with a knife, she said she had been held for six weeks.
"They'd given me a new hijab (headscarf), a new name (Aisha), and tried to convert me to Islam," she wrote.
As days turned to months, Carroll, who speaks Arabic and moved to Iraq to fulfill a dream of being a foreign correspondent, said she was interrogated, but, at times, was given a remote control to a television set where she watched the The Oprah Winfrey Show.
She said her captors also let her play with their children.
At one point, she said they served her from a platter of chicken and rice "that would have been fit for an honoured guest".
"We have no problem with you. Our problem is with your government," her captors told her as they prepared to release tapes of the journalist wearing a headscarf and weeping.
When Carroll first returned to the United States, she described her captivity as a horrific ordeal in a cave-like room sealed off from the world. She said she was threatened many times by her captors, whom she described as "criminals at best".
Just before her release, Carroll said she was forced by her captors to make a video in which she denounced the US presence in Iraq and praised the militants fighting American forces there. Carroll later disavowed those comments.
Carroll's parents and twin sister kept a public face on her ordeal through frequent, emotional appeals for her release on US and Arabic television.
On Thursday, the US military said it arrested four Iraqis suspected of being involved in Carroll's abduction.
(Remember those women missionaries arrested by the Taliban before the war in Afghanistan? )
In battle the muslim male is expected to kill their male enemies but it is acceptable to enslave the women of the enemy, or even marry those women if you can successfully convert them. When you've been taught, however indirectly, to think of women as inferior and as property, it's difficult to think of them as if they are as much your enemy as the man you just killed. A woman is a woman regardless of where she hails from, just so much property with opinions that never matter. So you tend to treat a female hostage as you would a captured enemy weapon, or as newly gained territory, rather than as an enemy or a potential threat. She is just something to be kept in good condition to be used as needed, but not neccessarily something to hate - unless some imam or council specifically directs that she needs to be punished for some infraction and needs to be killed instead of owned.
I call myself a rational human being by giving people the benefit of the doubt after they've been kidnapped and held at gunpoint and before I know the whole story. I would hope that's what good Christian people do as well. Excuse me if I erred.
Your apology in this case is accepted.
Maybe Condi should do a show.
Thanx for the support!!!! I can't believe I'm getting flamed!!!!! Got any extra asbestos with you? Mines getting thin!!
Your insinuation was snarky and thoughtless.
OMG! That is one of the funniest things I have read in a long time!!!!!!
I won't judge because she went through alot, but it seems like she might have Stockholm syndrome here.
"What doesn't add up?"Sex?
So... What is your definition of "evil murderer"?
It must not be these guys because they sent the Iraqi translator to heaven when they killed him, so they are benevolent murderers.
I have a source, which is my experience dealing with them while in Baghdad and Balad. The kidnap-for-ransom cells in Iraq are almost exclusively Sunni extremist and repeat offenders. They will typically kidnap the children, adult or otherwise, of wealthy Iraqi businessmen, and hold them until suitably paid.
The Iraqi's tend to come up with the money pretty fast, because long delays translate into horrific torture for the prisoners. I've got a pretty strong stomach, and I still find some of the debriefings hard to read.
Western hostages are rarely physically abused on the same level that Iraqi hostages are. The kidnappers apparently realize that non-Iraqi hostages, while lucrative, are a delicate matter. Straight brutality can be counterproductive when negotiating with Westerners. (With Iraqi prisoners, sending a video of a naked prisoner being beaten, shocked, mutilated and burnt directly to Mom and Dad seems the preferred way to remind them that they're late on the ransom payment.)
Jill Carroll may have been kidnapped by people who suddenly decided to take up kidnap-for-ransoming, but that's about as likely as your dentist taking up carjacking. Any of the criminal / extremist gangs I've seen do this repeatedly and exclusively, often as a fundraising tool for larger organizations.
Also, she seems to have been treated with great leniency, in comparison with other Western hostages. I'm going to withhold forming an opinion until I read her entire story, though.
If my feet are big, yours ought to be in the Smithsonian!
Carroll admits that they tried to convert her to Islam. And THAT damns her in your opinion? And now because she admits they "tried", you think they did because she's alive. Why don't you come out and say it. You apparently would have more respect for her if she had been killed. But the fact that she survived, just irritates the hell out of you.
You're pretty quick to jump to conclusions about this woman's mindset. That tells more about you than it does about her.
I'd want to be shot too if all I had to entertain me is 24/7 Al Jazeera.
MY COMMENTS were thoughtless...now, that's a laugh.
I really don't think you caught what I was saying....
To put it mildly, yes, but I want to see the full text of her story before jumping to conclusions.
This man does...Mattew 3-9
He said to them in reply, "And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?
4 For God said, 'Honor your father and your mother,' and 'Whoever curses father or mother shall die.'
5 But you say, 'Whoever says to father or mother, "Any support you might have had from me is dedicated to God,"
6 need not honor his father.' You have nullified the word of God for the sake of your tradition.
7 Hypocrites, well did Isaiah prophesy about you when he said:
8 'This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me;
9 in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines human precepts.'"
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Jesus was a man, not a woman and Christianity has been feminized by hypocrites...
What on EARTH are you trying to say...just say it.
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