Jill Carroll's story

If you aren't already following the series by Jill Carroll of the Christian Science Monitor on the story of her kidnapping by Iraq mujahideen, the Monitor has a Web page with a link to the series and supplementary online material: Hostage: The Jill Carroll Story.

Aside from its importance as a part of the history of the Iraq War, the installments that I've read so far (five have been published out of 10 plus an epilogue) involve some very good story-telling.

Jill's series is a real reminder that, for all of our legitimate complaints about the failures of our "press corps", there are reporters out that who are risking more danger than most of us would consider taking on voluntarily in order to be able to cover these wars and tell the story as they find it, not as the war propandists and bureacratic generals would wants us to hear it.

From installment 5:

At the beginning of my ordeal, I had hoped my kidnappers were amateurs who wouldn't really know what to do with me and would start to get very nervous after a few days. Then they'd let me go.

I knew they were Iraqis, which was good. It was the foreign-born insurgents - such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who beheaded hostages. ...

But after about a week in captivity - about the time of the showing of the jihadi videos - it became increasingly clear to me that they were the real deal. ...

During the precious few hours when the electricity worked, they would sometimes plug in a cassette player, and an angry voice would blare in classical Arabic from the room across the hall, where the guards slept. ...

"Do you know who that is?" one of the guards asked me at one point. "That is Sheikh Abu Musab. Is he a good man? What is your opinion of Zarqawi?"

I dodged the question. But inside, I felt the fear welling up. These were Zarqawi people! I was an American. I thought again, there was no way I was getting out of this alive.

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