Carroll, 28, was attacked along with a driver – Adnan Abbas – and an interpreter. The interpreter, Iraqi Alan Enwiya, was killed in the attack. Carroll wrote an account of her kidnapping and subsequent captivity, which was published in an 11-part series in The Christian Science Monitor in August.

Carroll is a Michigan native who attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; she graduated in 1999 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. After college, Carroll worked as a reporting assistant at The Wall Street Journal until August 2002. She then moved to Jordan where she reported for the English-language daily newspaper The Jordan Times in Amman.

A few months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Carroll moved to Iraq to pursue a freelance career as a Middle East correspondent. As a freelance journalist, she worked for news outlets such as the Italian news agency ANSA, USA Today and US News & World Report.

Despite the risk, Carroll’s assignments included reporting in the Anbar desert while embedded with U.S. Marines and chronicling the evolution of an Iraqi town from a haven for insurgents to a place laden with tension between townspeople and marines. On more than one occasion, Carroll awoke to the sound of bombs in Baghdad, but her tenacity led her to take time to talk to the people whose lives were forever changed by these blasts. For instance, she began reporting on one story about car bombs 17 months before it was published, returning every month or two to continue to tell the story of a family whose three-year-old daughter was paralyzed by a bomb.

During the fall 2006 academic semester, Carroll is taking a leave of absence from the Monitor to be one of four fellows at the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. She will research the decline of foreign bureaus in the newspaper industry.