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Carroll Followed Her Ambition to Iraq:Posted By: Tom Braswell By ADAM GORLICK, Associated Press Writer AMHERST, Mass. - All Jill Carroll ever wanted to be was a foreign correspondent.The 28-year-old freelance reporter for The Christian Science Monitor was released Thursday nearly four months after being kidnapped in Iraq. "I was treated well, but I don't know why I was kidnapped," Carroll said in a brief interview on Baghdad television. Her ordeal took place half a world away from where she began her career. Carroll, who grew in Michigan, received a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Massachusetts in 1999. After college, Carroll worked as a reporting assistant for The Wall Street Journal until 2002, when she was laid off. It was then that she moved to Jordan to pursue her dream of working overseas. "All I ever wanted to be was a foreign correspondent," Carroll wrote last year in the American Journalism Review. "It seemed the right time to try to make it happen." Carroll has had work from Iraq published in the Monitor, AJR, U.S. News & World Report, an Italian news wire and other publications. She has been interviewed often on National Public Radio. Unlike many Western reporters, Carroll speaks Arabic. One of her former professors at UMass, Howard Ziff, said Thursday that Carroll's decision to learn Arabic was a sign of her devotion to journalism and to the topic she was covering. "That means she knew it was going to be hard work but she knew this was the way to get close" to the issues and the people, Ziff said. Despite her language skills, Carroll used an Iraqi translator the day she was kidnapped. The abduction took place when the translator and Carroll were heading to meet Adnan al-Dulaimi, head of the Sunni Arab Iraqi Accordance Front, in the Adel section of the city. The neighborhood is dominated by Sunni Arabs and is considered one of the toughest in Baghdad. Carroll, in the AJR piece, noted that "kidnappings and beheadings increased, and Western reporters became virtual prisoners in their hotel rooms. When they did go out, they would travel with two cars: one up front with the reporter, and a 'chase car' following in case the first vehicle was attacked." Courtesy Of: Yahoo! News The information reported above is property of Yahoo! inc. and reprinted or modified with legitimate permission. We thank Yahoo! inc. for the kind cooperation with us and other shareholders. |
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