When American soldiers opened fire on the car carrying the Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena to Baghdad airport, she ducked behind the front seat while her companion Nicola Calipari — the intelligence officer who had freed her from kidnappers only a short while earlier — shielded her. Seconds later, a single shot to the head killed him.

“Nicola threw himself across me,” Sgrena, 56, remembers as she sits propped up in her Rome hospital bed. “The driver shouted, ‘We are Italians!’ but the shooting went on. We couldn’t even get out of the car. When I tried to move Nicola with my right arm, I heard a death-rattle. I didn’t have the strength to say anything at all.”

Sgrena herself, physically unharmed during her month in captivity, was injured in the shooting nine days ago. One bullet pierced her left shoulder, fracturing part of her collar-bone and fragments of bullets entered the membrane surrounding the lung. Doctors are due to operate on an injured muscle tomorrow.

Meanwhile the death of Calipari, an officer with the SISMI military intelligence service, has provoked an emotional outburst in Italy. Hundreds of thousands of Italians attended his funeral in Rome last week. Amid persistent reports that a ransom of $6m (£3.1m) was paid for Sgrena’s release, the affair has also prompted a turnaround by the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, who has yielded to American pressure and pledged that in future Italy will not submit to kidnappers’ demands.

A journalist with the communist newspaper Il Manifesto, Sgrena is no newcomer to war. She has covered fighting in Algeria and Afghanistan, and on her seventh trip to Iraq this winter she had “of course” thought she might become the target of kidnappers. “I took precautions. I never fixed appointments in advance. I never stopped a long time in one place,” she says in a voice made weak by her difficulty catching breath. But she disobeyed those rules on February 4 with disastrous consequences.

Long interested in the resistance movement in the town of Falluja, she set up an appointment to meet the imam of a mosque in Baghdad and asked him for permission to interview refugees from the town.

“What I do is report on the effect war has on people,” she says. “I’m not interested in strategy or military planning and here was an opportunity to speak to victims of the American crushing of Falluja,” she says. Several refugees agreed to tell her their stories.

Sgrena stayed there for four hours conducting interviews and was on her way back to her hotel when her driver stopped the car, jumped out and ran away. Another car had blocked the way and men firing into the air ran up and seized her. “It’s my turn,” was all she could think.

Three days into her kidnapping, she was allowed to see a report on the EuroNews network. It showed a giant picture of her that had been hung on the wall of Rome’s city hall, and this comforted her. But then the report mentioned a message from a group named the Jihad, saying that if Berlusconi did not withdraw Italian troops from Iraq by the next evening, she would be killed. “I believed it, even though my guards told me they didn’t want to kill me,” she says.

“On the evening the ultimatum was supposed to run out, I was so scared that I knocked hard on the door to talk to someone, and the guards even let me watch part of an American film. The next morning when two guards came at 5.30am, I was sure I was for it, but they were just checking on me.”

As well as fear she felt anger that the kidnappers had chosen her. One kidnapper told her they had a right to liberate their country. “You’re telling me,” she shot back. “I’ve always said that and I’m not an Iraqi.”

She then explained that she worked for an opposition newspaper. “Berlusconi isn’t going to pull out his troops from Iraq just because I ask him to,” she said. “If you want to kill me, you might as well do it now . . . In any case it’s easier to kill a woman than to go and fight the Americans in the street.”

She did suggest that she appeal to the Italian people to demonstrate in favour of a withdrawal of the country’s 3,000 troops. But when the guards filmed her, they told her the film wasn’t dramatic enough. She was a hostage, they insisted, she must be more convincing and ordered her to make a direct appeal to her boyfriend of 25 years, Pier Scolari. For the first time, Sgrena broke down in tears.