By: E&P Staff Continuing its 11-part series, the Christian Science Monitor published online Monday night and in print Tuesday the second part of reporter Jill Carroll's long-awaited account of life in captivity in Iraq.
The online installment comes with video interviews with her parents. This chapter also includes "contextual narrative" by fellow Monitor staffer Peter Grier.
It opens with a flashback to an incident at a beach during which her parents feared 4-year-old Jill had been abducted.
Then to cuts to Iraq and Carroll recalls how she "spent my first full day of captivity sitting in a plastic chair in the second-floor bedroom of a house in Baghdad, while the sound of gunfire echoed around me....
"Around dusk Abu Rasha, the No. 2 in charge and owner of the house, came into the room. He looked exhausted....He sat down on the bed and sighed.
"'They're right here. They're very near,' he said. 'Why, Jill? Why are the soldiers here? Why are the soldiers so near here?'
"The question was an accusation. ...'You don't have a mobile phone?' he said. 'Maybe in your hair?'
"I ripped off my head scarf and shook my hair loose. This was completely inappropriate behavior that would normally have deeply offended a Muslim man as apparently devout as he, but I was desperate." He checked her hair and left. The next day he acted sorry about the whole episode.
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