Who is Shelly Kittleson, the American journalist kidnapped in Iraq

Shelly Kittlesonwas already in the Iraqi capital when the news site Middle East Uncoveredpublished her latest reportfrom Syria on 25 March. Staying ahead of her dateline is not unusual for the veteran reporter who specializes in covering the Middle East and is always on the move. The 49-year-old journalist regularly alternates between Damascus, Baghdad, and Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan. The rest of the time, Kittleson resides in Rome, Italy, and contributes to the Saudi online magazine Al-Majalla, as well as to the American media outlets Al-Monitorand New Lines Magazine, and has also worked with Politico. In Italy, she works as an Italian-to-English translator for the Ansanews agency and writes for Il Foglio. Her most recent articlefor the Italian daily newspaper was published on Tuesday, March 31-the same day she was abducted.

Kittleson's journalism career began in Afghanistan in 2010. Originally from Wisconsin in the United States, she was 34 years old and finally getting closer to a career she had long dreamed of. During a 2018 interview for the Imperial War Museum podcast, she reflected on her long "transition" to journalism. She left the United States for Italy at 19 and held various jobs, including translating for the press, and began learning Russian. She later moved to Uzbekistan, partly to work on her Russian, before going to Afghanistan, where she began writing and taking photographs. There, she rediscovered an earlier inspiration: the issues of National Geographicmagazine that her grandmother collected, as she recounts in the podcast.

The year 2012 marked another turning point. She began traveling to Syria to report, as the now ousted Assad regime intensified its repression of the Syrian population, including journalists. To prepare for this, Kittleson began attending security training for freelance reporters in Beirut in 2014. She had participated in a similar program, also in the Lebanese capital, just one month before her abduction.

The training allowed her to stay up-to-date and continue covering war zones, work that earned her the Caravella Prize in 2017, awarded at the ninth edition of the Giornalisti del Mediterraneo("Mediterranean Journalists") festival, organized by the city of Otranto in southern Italy.

What happened to Shelly Kittleson?

On Tuesday, March 31, unidentified individuals grabbed Kittleson off the middle of a street in the center of Baghdad and shoved her into a car. According to the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior and the U.S. State Department, that vehicle later crashed, and the reporter was forced into another car, while one of her captors was injured and left behind. Iraqi security forces arrested and identified the man as belonging to the 45th Brigade of the Popular Mobilization Forces, an armed group linked to the Iraqi Shiite militia Kataeb Hezbollah, which is itself supported by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Iraqranks 155th out of 180 countries and territories in RSF's 2025 World Press Freedom Index. The last kidnapping of a journalist occurred in 2020, when Tawfik Al-Tamimi, editor-in-chief of the daily newspaper Al-Sabah, was abducted in broad daylight. His kidnapping followed three other abductions of journalists in Iraq since October 2019, including that of Rouhollah Zam, the Iranian director of the AmadNewswebsite, who was deported to Iran and executed on 12 December 2020.