In Ambush Lasting Seconds, U.S. Reporter in Iraq Becomes Hostage

In a scholarship application filled out shortly before Saturday's kidnapping, Carroll outlined proposals for reporting projects in Iraq. In them, she showed a keen understanding of the country.

She wanted to spend six months of the fellowship making her Arabic better still, she wrote in the application. "In this poorly understood region, where so much is at stake, important stories are lost everyday because the foreign press corps doesn't speak Arabic," Carroll wrote. "Journalism is a public service and readers are best-served if I and the people I am writing about speak the same language."

A Westerner in jeans, T-shirts and sweaters while at her place in Baghdad, Carroll slipped out into the city and much of Iraq wearing the black, enveloping abaya and head scarf of Iraqi women. Even with her red-frame glasses, she could walk unnoticed down a Baghdad street.

With violence roiling Iraq, a sizable number of foreign reporters largely restrict themselves to armored cars shuttling between hotels and the American-controlled Green Zone. They cover American officials and the isolated authorities of the U.S.-backed Iraqi government.

Carroll went out in unarmored vehicles, without bodyguards or follow-up security cars.

On Saturday, her abductors were able to stop her car without firing a shot, her driver said.

The Washington Post is withholding his identity, as well as that of the person who received the cell phone call, for security reasons.

Carroll had gone to the office of Adnan Dulaimi, a white-haired Sunni Arab politician. Carroll believed she had a 10 a.m. appointment, colleagues said. She arrived early. Workers in the office kept her waiting 10 to 15 minutes, then told her Dulaimi was busy, the driver said.

Dulaimi denied after the kidnapping that there had been an appointment. At 10 a.m., he was at a scheduled news conference elsewhere with a secular Shiite politician, former interim prime minister Ayad Allawi.

Coming out of nowhere Saturday, clean-cut, well-dressed men with pistols swarmed Carroll's car as she left the failed interview. The ambush happened within a few hundred feet of Dulaimi's office, the driver said; he hadn't gone far enough to shift the car beyond third gear.

One attacker planted himself in the car's path, screaming at the driver to stop. The driver said he initially thought the men were guards clearing the route for a convoy going to or from the office of Dulaimi, like hundreds of armed convoys bullying their way through Baghdad daily. The driver stopped.

The men pulled the driver from the car. Cursing, one man fired a shot toward the driver where he had fallen to his hands and knees on the pavement. The rest piled into the car, with Carroll and Enwiyah still inside. The gunmen were shouting too loudly, the driver said, for him to hear anything Carroll or Enwiyah said.