On day fifty-nine of her captivity, nine days after she was to be killed, friends and family members of kidnapped reporter Jill Carroll wait anxiously and hopefully for her release. With three deadlines now come and gone, it's not clear whether or not the kidnappers will set a fourth.
Iraq's interior minister Bayan Jabr raised hopes on Monday by saying that his ministry had detailed information about Carroll's kidnapper and a reason to hope. “We know his name and address, and we are following up on him as well as the Americans,” he told the Christian Science Monitor. “I think she is still alive.” Iraqi forces also raided homes in Baghdad looking for Carroll, without success.
Carroll's kidnappers initially demanded the US military release all female Iraqi prisoners, but they made no demands in the second Feb 9 video released of Carroll to Kuwaiti television station Al Rai. The US military had said they freed five Iraqi women from captivity shortly after Carroll's kidnapping, but that the release was unrelated to the kidnappers demands.
“Two months is an incredibly long time for someone to be held,” said David Cooke, the Christian Science Monitor's Washington Bureau Chief. “We're trying to keep a fresh approach and looking at it every morning to see what more we could be doing. We're a hopeful bunch by nature and we will not give up hope.”
I never met Carroll, but similar to her, I also traveled to Baghdad in 2003 as a freelancer for The Christian Science Monitor and other papers. Carroll and I stayed at the same budget hotel, the Musafir, and when the insurgency flared in late 2003, and large media organizations began hiring $50,000 a month security forces, we were both forced to adopt the same safety strategy: fly-under-the-radar.
Under this approach, our protection is our ability to go unnoticed. Like Carroll, I draped my heads with black abaya, put on mirrored sunglasses, applied thick Iraqi-style lip liner, and traveled around Baghdad with an unarmed translator in his junked Peugeot. Jill adopted an Arabic name of Zainab. I told Iraqis I was British. Both of us told ourselves that blending into the crowd was a safer strategy than that of the big Western news operations, which traveled in flak jackets and helmets, with armed chase cars.
Clearly, this is not the case. Baghdad on a budget brings only trouble, as the majority of Western reporters kidnapped or killed in Iraq have been freelance. Both Carroll and I were friends with Marla Ruzicka, the 28-year old Californian aid worker who was killed with her translator Faiz Ali Salim in April 2005 on the airport road by a suicide bomber aiming for a convoy of armed vehicles. Most of those in the armed vehicles survived.
The Monitor was one of the few American news organizations in Baghdad without a Western security adviser. Most news bureaus had hired a security company to provide anywhere from one to a dozen full-time armed guards, some Iraqi and some Western. Security costs can be phenomenal, often exceeding monthly the annual budget of an entire news bureau. In early 2004, I considered hiring two armed guards to proved round-the-clock protection for the house I shared in Baghdad with several other journalists. The lowest amount we were quoted was a prohibitive $30,000 a month. No doubt costs have since risen. Once hired, there was the challenge of keeping your guards loyal, and awake. (The guards hired to protect the gold-domed Al Askiriya mosque in Samarra were apparently asleep when it was blown apart.) Also, would two guards really provide enough security against a car bomb or an ambush team of six or more insurgents? Given the high costs of safety, it's no surprise that The Boston Globe recently announced they were closing their Baghdad bureau.
Nevertheless, Monitor staff reporters were offered some safety precautions -- such as a chase car, which is an extra car with an armed guard which follows reporters once they leave the hotel. But, according to Monitor editor Richard Bergenheim, Carroll chose not to use them.
My relationship with the Monitor was more of a ‘don't ask, don't offer.' Like most newspapers, The Monitor paid a set amount per story, plus the cost of a translator and driver. Adding security would have more than treble the costs. I feared the editors might reject my story as too expensive. So I never asked for it; they never offered: On one Monitor assignment in mid 2004 in the same Sunni neighborhood where Carroll was kidnapped, eight rockets landed within 20 yards of me and the US soldiers I was interviewing. No one was hurt. As I breathily described the scene to my editor, there were no offers of support beyond sympathy. Yet, I didn't begrudge the Monitor. After all, like Carroll, I was determined to stay in Baghdad, and desperate to find homes for my stories; if the Monitor didn't accept my work because they couldn't afford my security, as had happened with other freelancers and their newspapers, I'd be in Baghdad without security or a job.
Jill was driven to stay in Baghdad by more than financial motivations. Clearly, she wanted to tell the important stories. The desire to do your job versus the desire to preserve your safety are opposing forces that battle within the minds of most foreign correspondents. Those with a lower threshold for fear either get the big stories, or get killed. Every morning, I woke up in Baghdad and asked myself: is leaving my hotel room for this story worth my life? After 18 months on the ground, I decided my presence was putting my Iraqi sources and staff in danger, and in November 2004 I left Iraq for good. Months later, shortly before Carroll was kidnapped, insurgents drove two car bombs into the Al Hamra hotel where I had last stayed, destroying my bedroom and office.
Who kidnapped Jill Carroll? We know she was ambushed as she left the Baghdad office of Sunni Arab politician Adnan al-Dulaimi, who had not shown up for a supposedly pre-arranged interview. Why had Carroll made an appointment, days in advance, with a politician with suspected ties to the insurgency? Anyone in Dulaimi's staff could have set her up. Her driver could have had a role. Perhaps a member of her hotel staff alerted an insurgency group that she had left the hotel, and they followed her car.
This brings up the worst part of living and working in Baghdad under such conditions: the paranoia is intense. With a black market for kidnappings and ransom, Westerners are like roaming money bags in a city of chronically unemployed, desperate, and rife with anti-Americanism. All Iraqis have a financial incentive to kidnap Westerners, and such an incentive turns all your Iraqi friends -- trusted drivers, translators, cooks, friends -- into potential threats to your security. Suddenly, I asked myself: How well did I really know my beloved driver Abu Ali? What if insurgents threatened to kill his family if he didn't participate in my kidnapping? In my final days, I never told anyone my destination until I was in the car and driving, creating an obvious tension between myself and my staff. I never agreed to prearranged interviews. The “3-minute rule” which many correspondents are familiar with, dictates that you show up unannounced, stay three minutes, and then move on -- not giving anyone enough time to organize an ambush. Carroll had spent years in the Middle East: Why did she prearrange her interview? Who set her up?
Barring an unintended accident, I believe Carroll will be released for the simple reason she's no good to her kidnappers dead. The Committee to Protect Journalists says 39 journalists were kidnapped from 2004 until now, and 64 have been killed, 70 percent of whom were Iraqi. But if Carroll's kidnappers intended to kill her, I believe they would have done so by now. Most likely-- we hope-- they are in frustrated negotiations over a financial ransom. While the US government is known not to pay ransoms, in the past private donors have stepped forward and offered monies. We can only hope that these negotiations will bear fruit, and that Carroll will soon be safe at home to answer all these questions herself.
Christina Asquith, author of The Emergency Teacher, is a freelancer based in Washington, DC.
