PART 11: Epilogue, family reunion
Sunday, August 27, 2006 More than 100 journalists, including interpreters and assistants, have died in Iraq since March 2003. By PETER GRIER CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR STAFF WRITER On April 2, 2006, a white Lufthansa 747 with the designation "Hamburg" written on its side taxied up to a gate at Boston's Logan Airport. At 12:22 p.m., Jill Carroll stepped off the plane and onto U.S. soil. As she passed through customs, agents and other officials on duty crowded around for a chance to see her. Whisked into a waiting car, she was driven to the Monitor's headquarters in Boston's Back Bay, a police escort around her and news helicopters overhead. Carroll was traveling light. She'd left a big yellow bag of clothes and toiletries from her captivity in the Green Zone in Baghdad. She'd decompressed there for a day, talking to members of the U.S. Embassy's Hostage Working Group, before traveling on an aircraft carrying American casualties to Ramstein Air Force Base in Landstuhl, Germany. In Boston, her car went straight into the underground garage of the Christian Science church headquarters. In a preplanned bit of evasion, she was led through basement corridors under the complex to a loading dock on a nearby side street. She then jumped into a blue van — easily missing the media horde camped outside the Monitor building. The van went only a few blocks, to a nearby church-owned townhouse. There, (her parents) Jim, Mary Beth and (twin sister) Katie crowded around an open window, yelling her nickname, "Zippy!" Carroll met them coming down the hallway in a whole-family embrace. She wept and said, "I'm sorry." She was home. What's learned Nearly five months on, what's to be learned from Carroll's kidnapping and release? Monitor editors and correspondents were heartened by the global condemnation of the kidnapping, especially from Muslim religious leaders and even militant groups, such as Hamas. They remain proud of the media campaign they helped mount, from the solicitation of statements on her behalf to the public service announcements that ran in the Iraqi media. They believe it was targeted to the right audience — the Middle East — and well-placed. They know the kidnappers saw some of it. It's presumptuous to say it led directly to her release, but "I do think that changed the mental climate," says Richard Bergenheim, editor of the Monitor. Another obvious conclusion is that Iraq has become a very dangerous place for the news media. More than 100 journalists, including interpreters and assistants, have died there since March 2003. Since Carroll's kidnapping, the Monitor has upgraded its security measures in Baghdad — both because of what had happened to her and because of the worsening situation on the ground. Editors won't detail those measures, so as not to undermine their effectiveness. The paper has kept a British security firm on retainer for consultation. As for Carroll herself, she says that her experience taught her about priorities. Throughout her 82-day ordeal, she missed her family and her friends. Work and success didn't seem so important anymore. "I never once wished I'd filed one more story," she says. But she doesn't regret going to Iraq in the first place. She was doing what she had always wanted to do — foreign reporting. Since her release, she has returned to Egypt and is glad of it. She experienced again the distinctive culture of the Islamic world in a peaceful context. "What happened to me is not the whole Middle East," she says. Change in status Carroll is no longer a freelancer. To provide financial support in anticipation of her eventual release, the Monitor quietly made Jill a full-time employee a week after she was abducted. This fall, she's been accepted into a journalism fellowship program at a major university. After that, she plans to return to writing from overseas. Why was she released? Probably no one really knows except for her kidnappers. Maybe the public pressure worked. Maybe private whispers via Western and Middle Eastern intelligence convinced influential Sunnis that harming her wasn't in their best interest. Maybe as the political situation changed, so did the priorities of her kidnappers. Maybe the kidnappers just got what they wanted — publicity or the release of women from Abu Ghraib prison. Or maybe Carroll herself — the smart, young American who spoke Arabic — helped alter her captors' plans. "One of the most effective weapons against terrorism is the truth. The truth was that Jill Carroll was not the enemy of her captors. Her father spoke that truth, and the rest of the world repeated it," says Christopher Voss, special agent with the FBI's Crisis Negotiation Unit in Quantico, Va. As far as the Monitor and her family can determine, no ransom changed hands to win her release. Earlier this month, the U.S. military announced that it had captured four of her kidnapping suspects after raiding four locations in Baghdad, Abu Ghraib and a village west of Fallujah. U.S. sources in Baghdad have told staff writer Scott Peterson that the man Carroll knew as "Abu Ahmed" (aka Sheik Sadoun, say U.S. military sources) was arrested by U.S. Marines on May 19. The others in custody are guards, not the top figures in the group. Others affected Members of murdered translator Alan Enwiya's immediate family have left Iraq, where they felt endangered. They are applying for U.S. government permission to join their extended family in the U.S. Carroll never met the man who shot Alan. She was told that Alan's killer died a few weeks later during an insurgent military operation. Driver Adnan Abbas, having survived the abduction, was initially a suspect. He passed a polygraph test and was cleared by Iraqi police. He, his wife, and four children (including a newborn) have also moved to another country. Their future remains uncertain, but their ambition is to live and work in the U.S. The Monitor has established two funds to help these families start new lives. Among the donations received so far: The $800 cash the mujahedeen gave Jill just before her release. She plans to sell the gold necklace and donate those funds as well. How to help Alan Enwiya is one of more than 100 journalists and media assistants killed in Iraq since March 2003. Alan is survived by his wife, Fairuz; his two children, Martin and Mary Ann; and his parents. They have left Iraq and hope to move to the U.S., where they have relatives. Carroll's driver, Adnan Abbas, is a witness to Alan's murder. He, his wife and their four children (including a newborn) have also fled Iraq for their own safety. In response to readers, the Monitor has established funds to help each family start a new life. Donations may be sent to The Alan Enwiya Fund for the Adnan Abbas Fund, c/o The Christian Science Monitor, One Norway Street, Boston, MA 02115.