In a video posted on an Islamist website and recorded by her captors before she was freed, the 28-year-old freelancer for The Christian Science Monitor spoke out against the American military presence. Her parents said the comments were coerced.
''Tens of thousands . . . have lost their lives here because of the occupation," she said in the video. ''I think Americans need to think about that and realize day-to-day how difficult life is here."
Carroll, who was freed Thursday, said the insurgents were ''only trying to defend their country . . . to stop an illegal and dangerous and deadly occupation."
US Embassy spokeswoman Liz Colton declined comment, saying all queries regarding Carroll were being handled by her family and the Monitor.
The Monitor's editor, Richard Bergenheim, said that Carroll's parents, who spoke to her about the video, told him it was ''conducted under duress."
''When you're making a video and having to recite certain things with three men with machine guns standing over you, you're probably going to say exactly what you're told to say," Bergenheim told ABC's ''Good Morning America." He told NBC's ''Today" show that Carroll was ''emotionally fragile."
Carroll, a graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, was seized Jan. 7 in western Baghdad by gunmen who killed her Iraqi translator. She was dropped off Thursday at an office of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni Arab organization, and later escorted to the Green Zone by the US military.
At first, she was reluctant to go, but a Monitor writer in Baghdad, Scott Peterson, convinced her that it was safe, the newspaper said.
In the video, her abductors said they released Carroll because ''the American government met some of our demands by releasing some of our women from prison." The kidnappers, calling themselves the Revenge Brigades, had demanded the release of all female detainees in Iraq by Feb. 26 or Carroll would be killed.
US officials did release some female detainees at the time, but said it had nothing to do with the kidnappers' demands. On Thursday, US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said the United States is still holding four women.
