The Jill Carroll Story: Part 1

An Interview Turns Deadly; Captors Decide To Make A Video

(Christian Science Monitor)  Alan was vital to my newsgathering process. We had been a team for almost two years. We were also friends — it felt as if we were almost siblings — who'd worked through Iraq's difficult and increasingly dangerous conditions.

In our time together we'd eked out a living freelancing for the Italian news agency ANSA, U.S.A Today, U.S. News & World Report, and now The Christian Science Monitor. We had been threatened by militia members, mobbed after Friday prayers, and seen bullets rain down from passing police vehicles. We'd walked hours through Baghdad soliciting interviews from ordinary Iraqi voters.

During long days in traffic jams, Alan would tell me funny stories about his daughter and infant son, marveling at how fast they were growing. I would tease him that I was a spy for his wife, Fairuz, and would report to her if I caught him looking in the direction of a pretty girl.

The first interview on our list that morning was Adnan al-Dulaimi, a Sunni politician. While there was a handful of what Western journalists considered no-go neighborhoods in Baghdad — his office wasn't in that category yet. But we had taken our normal security precautions. I was dressed, for example, in a black hijab that hid my hair and Western clothes. We'd been to Dulaimi's office several times before without a problem. Our last trip had been two days earlier to set up this interview.

In retrospect, that was a fatal mistake; we had given someone 48 hours to prepare for our return.

Adnan Abbas, the Monitor's longtime driver — who'd shared many of our harrowing experiences — guided his maroon Toyota sedan along the familiar route to Dulaimi's office, dropping us off 20 minutes earlier than the scheduled time of 10 a.m.

Inside, Dulaimi's aides steered us away from the usual waiting room full of men drinking sweet tea in tiny glasses, and into an adjoining room where we were alone. Alan and I noticed the strangeness of this move at the same moment.

"Well, it's better," Alan said. "You're a woman and there are a lot of men in there."

The minutes passed and aides walked through the room chatting on cellphones. I understood through my rudimentary Arabic that they were telling various people that a reporter was waiting to see Dulaimi. But a little after 10 a.m. the same aide who had made the appointment for us approached us.

"Sorry, Dr. Dulaimi has a press conference right now," the aide said. "He can't talk to you. Can you come back at 12?"

I wondered why I hadn't heard about the press conference before now.

We agreed to come back later and stepped out into the bright sunny morning where Adnan was waiting for us.

As we walked to the car, Alan reminded me that we needed to call ahead to make sure our next interview was still on. He climbed into the front, and I handed him my phone from the back seat, my usual place. He began shouting into the phone, trying to make himself heard over Baghdad's overloaded, spotty cellphone network.

Adnan had begun to pull away, but suddenly a large blue truck with red and yellow trim backed out of a driveway in front of us, completely blocking the road. Several men were standing around it, motioning to help it back out.

But in an instant they turned, trained pistols on us, and briskly approached the car.

Adnan hit the brakes, and he and Alan 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.

But unlike the previous times, the men didn't lower their weapons and they kept advancing. The man closest to the car, a rotund person with salt-and-pepper stubble, had his gun aimed right through the windshield at Adnan.

My eyes were glued to him. I was confused about why he didn't lower his pistol. At the same time Adnan and Alan opened their doors and began to get out of the car.

The gunmen ran at us. A whisper exploded from me into a scream, "No, no, NO!" as I tried to get out. The door closed on my right ankle as someone shoved me back in, pushing so hard that the right lens of my glasses popped out. Through the crack in the door — before the intruder slammed it — I saw the last moment of Alan's life.

Adnan was gone. The rotund man was in the driver's seat now. Other men jumped in sandwiching me between them. We sped away, out onto the main road, then turned right.

"Jihad! Jihad! Jihad!" my abductors shouted, excited and joyful. "Jihad! Jihad!"

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(P.G.) The taking of Jill Carroll off a Baghdad street on Jan. 7, 2006, created many hostages, of whom Jill herself was simply the central one, and the most endangered.

For her family and many friends and colleagues, normal life ended in the hours and days to come, as they heard what had happened. Henceforth, there would be worry, sometimes fear, and new routines that had one aim: free Jill.

Their solace was action. The first thing her father Jim Carroll did that black Saturday morning was fire up his computer to see what he could learn, while Mary Beth, her mother, contacted family members. Sister Katie, who worked for an international development consulting company, began calling every number she knew in the Middle East.