DRAPED from head to toe in a black abaya and wearing a hijab, or scarf, on her head, Jill Carroll hoped to pass unnoticed through the streets of Baghdad. She was proud to be a foreign correspondent — it was “all I ever wanted to be”, she wrote — but in Iraq it is a job best kept under wraps.

Carroll, a 28-year-old American freelance for The Christian Science Monitor, was abducted in Baghdad last weekend when gunmen ambushed her car and killed Allan Enwiyah, her Iraqi translator. Al-Qaeda posted a statement on the internet claiming responsibility for her kidnapping but her fate remains unknown.

The days when journalists plastered the word “press” in bold capital letters on their car windscreens for protection have gone. According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), the Iraq war has claimed the lives of 60 reporters in two years, only six fewer than the number of journalists killed in 20 years of fighting in Vietnam.

Carroll is the 36th journalist to have been abducted in Iraq since 2004 and the first American woman. At least 22 journalists, most of them Iraqis, died last year.

“The war in Iraq might lead one to think that reporters are losing their lives on the battlefield,” said Ann Cooper, executive director of the CPJ. “But the fact is that three out of four journalists killed around the world are singled out for murder and their killers are rarely brought to justice.”

Offering hope for Carroll and her family, several western reporters taken hostage last year were released, including Rory Carroll (no relation), a journalist on The Guardian, and Phil Sands, a Briton working for the Dubai newspaper Emirates Today, who was freed on New Year’s Eve.

Sands, 28, was abducted on Boxing Day in Baghdad. “From the moment I was taken hostage I was certain I would be killed,” he recalled yesterday.

Speaking to his newspaper from from his home in Poole, Dorset, Sands said he felt lucky to be alive. US troops came across him during a routine sweep. No one knew he had been kidnapped.

Sands and other ambitious and idealistic reporters are lured to Iraq by what Jill Carroll described as the “love of the story”. She was well aware of the risks: her friend Marla Ruzicka, 28, a humanitarian aid worker, had died when she was caught in a roadside ambush.

It was Ruzicka who had cheered Carroll up when she arrived in Baghdad as an inexperienced reporter three years ago.

Carroll admitted she was “quietly freaking out” but she steeled her nerves, learnt Arabic and went on to become a respected journalist. “I’ve never had any indication that she was reckless,” said Marshall Ingwerson, managing editor of The Christian Science Monitor. “She’s a professional, straight- up, fact-oriented reporter.”

Journalists expect to take risks and come under fire in wartime, but only recently have they been singled out as targets.

When Daniel Pearl, a reporter on The Wall Street Journal, was abducted and beheaded in Pakistan in 2002 while investigating the British shoe bomber, it was obvious that the rules of engagement had changed. The media became a weapon which was used against Pearl when some Pakistani newspapers reported that he was Jewish.

Mindful of the harm caused by careless words, The Christian Science Monitor last week asked all media to honour a news blackout of Carroll’s name “out of respect for the journalist and the ongoing intensive effort to free her”.

It was 48 hours before the newspaper, fearful that its “Christian” designation would be misunderstood by Islamic terrorists, finally agreed to release her name. The decision has sparked a row over media ethics in America, with claims that newspapers were quick to protect their own, while publishing national security information the White House protests could endanger American lives.

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