Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter.
Shelly Kittleson, an American journalist, spent a decade covering the Middle East, traveling often from Italy, where she has lived for many years, to Syria, Iraq, and other countries in the region. In March, during a reporting trip to Baghdad, the FBI warned Kittleson that she could be kidnapped or killed. She immediately called her friend Alex Plitsas, an Army Special Operations combat veteran who is now a fellow with the Atlantic Council, where he researches counterterrorism policy. “She said that if anything happened to her, I should be her point of contact,” he told me. That call might have saved Kittleson’s life.
On March 31, when Kittleson failed to check in as planned, Plitsas searched X, where he found a video of Kittleson being accosted on a Baghdad street and forced into a car. Iraqi authorities gave chase and, after a crash, apprehended one of the kidnappers. Kittleson, however, was in a different car. Plitsas immediately suspected that her kidnappers were members of Kata‘ib Hezbollah, a Shiite militant group aligned with Iran that is enmeshed with the Iraqi army and government. They beat Kittleson viciously, breaking several of her ribs. According to Kittleson’s account in The Atlantic, when they got to the place where they held her captive, they yanked her from the car and dragged her across the pavement, then used her bloody stockings as a blindfold. “You are innocent, we know that,” one of her captors told her. “But there is a war right now, and you have an American passport.”
Kittleson is the first American journalist to have been kidnapped in more than a decade, according to research by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), where I previously served as executive director. It’s impossible to know at this juncture whether her abduction was an anomaly or a warning sign, but kidnapping and hostage-taking have always been tactics in asymmetrical conflicts like the kind percolating across the Middle East. Though Kittleson is now free, her experience has raised concern that the targeted kidnapping of journalists could reemerge as a threat. Several journalism security experts told me that US media organizations operating in the region are starting to consider this possibility. The current risk is not only in Iraq, but also in Lebanon. In 1985, Hezbollah militants kidnapped Terry Anderson, an AP correspondent, and held him for nearly seven years. Hezbollah later forswore hostage-taking as a tactic, but with Israel and the US at war in Iran, Hezbollah is engaged in an existential struggle and may be reconsidering its options.
Iran, too, has arrested a number of US journalists on false charges, a tactic sometimes referred to as hostage diplomacy. Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post reporter, was held for 544 days and released following complex negotiations with the Obama administration tied to the nuclear deal. Though Kuwait’s recent detention of Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, a Kuwaiti American journalist, does not appear to have been part of a coercive strategy, it was a reminder of how vulnerable journalists are while operating in a region riven by war.
Sharbil Nammour, who oversaw safety at Vice for a decade and recently joined Merrill Herzog, a crisis response firm, sees a rapidly evolving landscape in the Middle East in which the risk of kidnapping is growing. Hostage diplomacy—once the domain of states such as Iran, but also Russia and Venezuela, which arrested Americans and used them as leverage to extract concessions—is now increasingly being practiced by non-state actors. “Criminal networks and militant groups have recognized the pattern and adapted accordingly,” Nammour told me. “They are shifting from opportunistic kidnappings to the deliberate targeting of individuals, mimicking the effects of state-driven detention without needing any of the formal state apparatus.”
Over the past half century, the risk to US journalists of being kidnapped has ebbed and flowed. The last wave began in January of 2002, when Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter, was kidnapped in Pakistan by Al Qaeda militants and later beheaded by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of Osama bin Laden’s top lieutenants and the principal architect of 9/11. (Mohammed is among the last remaining Al Qaeda militants incarcerated at Guantánamo.) Pearl’s murder sent a signal to militant groups that journalists were fair game. More kidnappings ensued, from Afghanistan, where David Rohde, a reporter for the New York Times, was taken hostage by the Taliban, to Somalia and Iraq.
In 2012, as militants from the Islamic State, or ISIS, were consolidating power in Syria, they also began to target international journalists and aid workers. Journalists including James Foley and Steven Sotloff were taken hostage by ISIS. The US government refused to pay ransom for their release, even as European hostages were freed in exchange for multimillion-dollar payments. Both men were beheaded.
There’s a clear reason for this asymmetry. Since the Nixon administration, the US has had a “no concessions” policy, meaning the government will not negotiate or make substantive concessions to terrorists who take Americans hostage. There is scant evidence that refusing to negotiate makes Americans safer—and plenty of evidence that it gets Americans killed. So, in 2015, the Obama administration organized a hostage policy review in which Plitsas, who was then working at the Pentagon, participated. While it left in place the no-concessions framework, it provided greater support for families and some flexibility, making clear, for example, that “talking” to militant groups was permitted.
After Kittleson was kidnapped, Plitsas called everyone he knew in the US government—which was pretty much everyone who mattered. He called the State Department; the National Security Council; the FBI; the Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell, which coordinates the government’s response to kidnappings; and the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs (SPEHA), which marshals diplomatic resources while providing support for hostage families. “The State Department previously fulfilled our duty to warn this individual of threats against them and we will continue to coordinate with the FBI to ensure their release as quickly as possible,” Dylan Johnson, a State Department spokesman, wrote on X the day Kittleson was taken.
In addition to pushing the US government, Plitsas stepped up to manage the public messaging about Kittleson’s abduction, working with groups including CPJ, Reporters Without Borders, and the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation. Plitsas was unhappy with some press outlets that cited the State Department’s warning to suggest that Kittleson had acted recklessly by staying in Iraq, where she was one of the few American journalists still reporting from the ground. Plitsas calls Kittleson’s work a “service for the world” and says that a tolerance for risk is a “journalistic necessity.”
On April 8, more than a week after her abduction, Kittleson was released after the intervention of Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani, the Iraqi prime minister. Media reports indicate that the Iraqi government released several Kata‘ib Hezbollah militants in exchange for her freedom. I was unable to confirm this. But my own experience is that kidnappings are generally resolved through negotiations. I chronicled this reality in my 2014 book, We Want to Negotiate.
During the Obama administration, US diplomats regularly made clear to America’s allies that they did not want them to make concessions to terrorist organizations to free Americans. But both Trump administrations have shown greater flexibility, while pushing the boundaries of the existing policy. Trump has taken a personal interest in bringing American hostages home, and has a record of success. He claims to have recovered more than a hundred hostages in his second term, though some have criticized him for personalizing the process and undermining US strategic interests. Rob Saale, a former FBI special agent who worked on hostage response, told me during Trump’s first term that the politicization of hostage policy “put a target on the back of every American abroad.”
The Trump administration remains committed to hostage recovery, but the SPEHA’s office is in some disarray. It is now led by a Nashville-based healthcare executive named Adam Boehler, who has been involved in negotiations with Hamas over the US citizens held hostage in Gaza and who also worked on the case of Elizabeth Tsurkov, a Russian Israeli Princteon graduate student who is not an American citizen. Tsurkov was kidnapped by Kata‘ib Hezbollah in March of 2023 in Baghdad and endured more than two years in captivity.
Jon Alterman, an expert on global security and Middle East policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, argued that the US should enhance its hostage response and recovery capabilities in the face of rising regional instability. “Individuals can do all sorts of wonderful things for short periods of time,” Alterman told me. “Sustaining outcomes often requires an institution to do so. The administration’s general approach to institutions is skepticism.”
That militants, according to Kittleson’s account, said she was taken as leverage in a regional war because she is an American is chilling and illuminating. Media organizations—and the Trump administration—must be prepared for the possibility that kidnapping and state hostage-taking will reemerge as a threat to US journalists operating in a region in turmoil.
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story misstated when Plitsas met Kittleson.
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.
