Rory Carroll, the Guardian's Baghdad correspondent, writes in the Saturday newspaper on the terrifying 36 hours of incarceration between his kidnap and release. You can read his report now, or listen to his account as a seven minute MP3 file. As Carroll writes, kidnap is "a potential death sentence for Iraqi staff as well as the foreign correspondents who are the targets" and his fellow reporters had become obsessed by it. This is how his ordeal started.
We finished the interviews, deep in the Baghdad slum known as Sadr City, and the Guardian's two vehicles started heading back to the hotel. The street was deserted until three cars, including a police Land Cruiser, sliced around a corner and into our path. Gunmen piled out and surrounded us.
One pistol-whipped Safa'a, the driver, spraying his blood on to my lap. Another wrestled the translator, Qais, out of the door on to the ground. Another pumped three bullets into the windscreen of the follow-up vehicle, narrowly missing the driver, Omar.
It was 2.15pm on Wednesday, and a moment I had dreaded since moving to Iraq nine months earlier had arrived: kidnap.
Read the full account here.
