Channel surfing with the mujahideen

Jill Carroll arrives at a US airbase in Germany after her release. Photograph: Michael Probst/AP

The US journalist Jill Carroll has written a substantial account of her 82 days kept as a hostage by militants in Iraq. Her kidnappers dragged her into a car at gunpoint in January this year in Baghdad and shot dead her Iraqi interpreter, Alan Enwiya.

The first of 11 instalments of Carroll's story was published yesterday on the website of the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor, where the 28-year-old is now a staff writer.

The account begins with her feelings of horror when she was told her kidnappers wanted to film a second propaganda video of her and she suspected she was about to be beheaded.

Carroll, a freelancer at the time of her capture, says she pleaded with one of her captors for a quick death by pistol, saying: "I don't want the knife."

After she was released in April this year, Carroll was forced to go on the defensive amid attacks from conservative bloggers that she had been unduly influenced by her captors and had some sympathy with their aims.