Welcome Home to Jill Carroll!

When Elizabeth Smart was discovered after her lengthy disappearance in Utah, it was a miracle. The public was ecstatic. Elizabeth had beat the odds.

That's exactly the way I felt this morning when I discovered that Jill Carroll, the 28-year-old freelance writer on assignment for The Christian Science Monitor, had been freed by her captors. Just last night or the night before, I had seen her twin sister on CNN, pleading in a calm tone for her sisters' release. I thought, how terrible and how pointless. She will never return.

But I was wrong! Carroll, who was seized in Baghdad on January the seventh in a violent ambush that killed her translator, was dropped off near the Iraqi Islamic Party Office, according to Yahoo News. She went inside and the people contacted American officials.

"I was treated well, but I don't know why I was kidnapped," Carroll said in a short interview on Iraqi TV. Few details about the kidnapping have been released but we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief that she's back.

Sigrid Mac

P.S. It's important to keep in mind that the most likely kidnap victims in
Iraq are Iraqis "with an average of 10 to 20 taken hostage every day for nearly three years, a U.S. official in Baghdad said Thursday." (source - Associated Press.)