Jill Carrolls tale

last updated 8 January 2015

Boston

The Christian Science Monitor this week published the first installments of journalist Jill Carroll’s harrowing account of her hostage ordeal in Baghdad. At one moment, she writes, she believed she was about to be killed, and begged one of her captors to shoot her to death rather than stab her. “I don’t want the knife, use the gun,” she said. She also tells of her first full day in captivity, when she heard a firefight raging outside the house where she was being held. She later learned U.S. soldiers had received a tip she was nearby and were battling Sunni insurgents as they searched for her. That was as close as she came to being rescued. Her captors released her in March, 82 days after they took her hostage and killed her translator. She now lives in Boston, where she’s an editor for the Monitor. “She doesn’t seek celebrity,” said her father, Jim Carroll. “She wants to be the reporter, not the story.”