Jill Carroll, the American journalist who spent three months as a hostage in Iraq, returned to the United States on Sunday in a homecoming clouded by charges from conservative bloggers that she had fallen under the influence of her kidnappers.
Carroll (28) a freelance journalist working for the Christian Science Monitor when she was abducted in Baghdad in January, arrived in Boston, the newspaper’s home city, on a commercial flight from Ramstein air force base in Germany.
”I finally feel like I am alive again. I feel so good,” Carroll told a colleague from the Monitor who had accompanied her on the plane, in a story that appeared on the paper’s website on Sunday. ”To be able to step outside anytime, to feel the sun directly on your face — to see the whole sky. These are luxuries that we just don’t appreciate every day.”
She did not speak to reporters on her arrival, and there was no immediate word on her plans following the reunion of Carroll with her mother, father and twin sister. Carroll left the airport in a black limousine for the Monitor‘s offices in Boston. Reporters who travelled with her on the plane said she planned to spend the next few days with her family at an apartment in Boston.
In her first hours of freedom, Carroll and the Monitor were forced to counter allegations by conservative bloggers that she had betrayed a sympathy for her kidnappers.
The charge was given currency by the New York Times, which suggested Carroll had come to identify with her abductors’ aims.
In a statement posted on the Monitor website on Saturday, Carroll dismissed any suggestion she shared the aims of her kidnappers: ”Let me be clear: I abhor all who kidnap and murder civilians, and my captors are clearly guilty of both crimes.” She also pleaded to be seen as a journalist and not a hostage, suggesting she wanted to return to work once she recovers from the kidnapping.
The charges against Carroll arose from a video she made in captivity that surfaced soon after her release, in which she was critical of the US military presence in Iraq. The video was recorded last Wednesday after Carroll had been held for more than 80 days in a small room with boarded-up windows. Her statement said the video had been made under duress. ”I was living in a threatening environment, under their control and wanted to go home alive,” she said.
Carroll told the Monitor that she had been moved several times during her captivity, but was always held in rooms whose windows were either blocked or obscured.
She was kidnapped on January 7 while on her way to an interview with a Sunni politician, by armed men who shot dead her translator, Allan Enwiya. Following her abduction, her captors warned repeatedly that she would be killed unless the US freed all female prisoners in Iraq, and aired a video showing Carroll sobbing and in obvious distress.
That video, and the reputation Carroll had established since basing herself in the Middle East in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, generated enormous sympathy for her plight. An Arabic speaker, Carroll was known as someone who cared deeply about the situation in Iraq.
Since her release, the US authorities and the Monitor have said there were no negotiations on her behalf, and no payment of ransom.
On Saturday, Carroll also disavowed an interview granted to Iraqi television immediately after she was freed in which she said she was never threatened by the kidnappers. ”In fact, I was threatened many times,” she said. ”Things that I was forced to say while captive are now being taken by some as an accurate reflection of my personal views. They are not.” – Guardian Unlimited Â