In a first-person account, published in The Atlantic on April 23, Kittleson revealed the details of the week-long ordeal she had suffered at the hands of members of the Iran-backed militia group Kataib Hezbollah.
A seasoned reporter of conflicts in the Middle East, with more than a decade of experience in Iraq, she had been on assignment in the country for just one week when she was snatched off the street outside her Baghdad hotel on March 31.
CCTV footage captured the moment two men bundled her into a car. She was zip-tied, blindfolded, had a hood placed over her head and was beaten viciously until she passed out on the floor of the car.Later, she was forced to record a scripted confession, “admitting” to being a US agent.
But, unlike many of those kidnapped before her over the years, she was then released, alive, and quickly, leaving two questions hanging in the air: Why was she taken? And why was she released so quickly?
Kittleson’s case immediately focused minds in the highest echelons of the US government. Last week, her release was announced by no less a figure than Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Thanking Iraqi officials for their help, Rubio said the journalist’s release “reflects the (Donald) Trump administration’s steadfast commitment to the safety and security of American citizens, no matter where they are in the world.”
But history teaches that Iranian hostage-taking, whether by proxies such as Kataib Hezbollah or by Tehran itself — frequently under spurious accusations of espionage — is seldom if ever carried out without an economic or diplomatic motive.
As the confrontation between Washington and Tehran rumbles on, the Kittleson case raises the specter of further Western hostages — human leverage in the hands of an Iranian regime fighting an asymmetrical conflict and in pursuit of concessions at the negotiating table.
The taking and quick release of Kittleson may well have been a demonstration, signaling that Tehran could be preparing to open another front in its standoff with the US.Upon Kittleson’s release, Abu Mujahid Al-Assaf, a Kataib Hezbollah security official, issued what amounted to a warning.
The group’s gesture of mercy, he said, would “not be repeated again in the coming days, as we are in a state of war launched by the Zionist-American enemy against Islam, and in such cases many considerations are discarded.”
Kittleson’s ordeal may have had a happy ending, but the list of those who have preceded her, and who were not so lucky, is long.
They include Margaret Hassan, the 59-year-old Irish-born humanitarian and director of CARE International Iraq, who was kidnapped during the post-invasion insurgency on Nov. 8, 2004, and whose body has never been found.
Married in 1972 to Tahseen Ali Hassan, an Iraqi who was studying in the UK, Hassan became an Iraqi citizen and had lived in the country for 32 years at the time of her kidnapping in October 2004 and subsequent murder.
In a hostage video, Hassan appealed to the British people to tell then-UK prime minister Tony Blair “to take the troops out of Iraq.” She did not, she added, want to end up like Kenneth Bigley, a British civil engineer who had just been beheaded on video, along with two US colleagues.
They are just a few among many who were taken by various groups for a range of reasons. By 2006, more than 200 foreigners and thousands of Iraqis had been kidnapped by militants, nationalists or criminal gangs.
Other countries, including Lebanon, have seen their share of high-profile kidnappings driven by Iranian interests.In April 1987, the British journalist John McCarthy was seized in Beirut by the Islamic Jihad Organization, a Shiite militia precursor to Hezbollah also financed and trained by Iran.
McCarthy was just one of more than 100 foreign hostages seized between 1982 and 1987 when the Lebanese civil war was raging, as Iran and its proxies sought concessions from Western powers.
What unfolded over the next few years demonstrated to Tehran and its proxies the value of kidnapping as a form of leverage rather than a weapon of vengeance.McCarthy was held for over five years before his release in August 1991. While in captivity, he shared a cell with an Irish captive, Brian Keenan, who had been taken hostage by the same group a year before.
They would be joined in Lebanon by Terry Waite, an assistant to the UK’s archbishop of Canterbury who had turned hostage negotiator.In 1980, Waite had secured the release of several Anglican hostages in Iran and in 1986 played a part in the freeing of an American priest who had been held in Beirut for 564 days.
But it later emerged that behind the scenes of Waite’s efforts on behalf of seven US hostages being held in Lebanon, the US government was secretly shipping arms to Iran as a ransom payment.
President Ronald Reagan later admitted that “what began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages.”
In January 1987, Waite himself was taken hostage after flying to Beirut to negotiate the release of other hostages. He was finally released in November 1991, having been held for 1,763 days.
Released at the same time was Thomas Sutherland, dean of agriculture at the American University of Beirut, who had been held for 2,353 days. His incarceration was the second longest after that of Terry Anderson, a US journalist and former Marine.
Anderson, who was taken in March 1985 and held for the next six-and-a-half years, was released in December 1991, a month after Waite and Sutherland.
Although kidnappings have frequently been carried out by Iranian proxies, Tehran is not above pulling off its own state-sanctioned abductions, seemingly to use its victims as bargaining chips with Western governments.
For example, Ahmadreza Djalali, an Iranian-Swedish academic specializing in disaster medicine, was arrested in Iran in 2016 and has remained in prison ever since, accused of espionage. He faces a death sentence.
A British couple, Craig and Lindsay Foreman, who were arrested in Iran in January 2025 while on a round-the-world motorcycle trip, were accused of being spies and sentenced to 10 years in prison, where they have remained throughout the current conflict.
Usually, Iran’s motives for such hostage-taking become clear only after the event. Money is often at the heart of it.Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian dual national, was detained in the country for six years, from April 2016 to March 2022.
She was released only after Britain agreed to pay Iran almost £400 million ($540 million) — a debt linked to an unfilled order for tanks that had been placed by Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi before the fall of his regime in 1979.
In September 2023, five US hostages held by Iran were released in exchange for five Iranian prisoners, charged with sanctions violations and other federal crimes, and the freeing of $6 billion of frozen Iranian oil funds.
At the time, an analysis by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy said that “even if striking a deal to bring wrongfully detained Americans home is justified, it undoubtedly validates Iran’s view that hostage-taking is an acceptable way to achieve its goals.”
Washington, the analysis continued, had “a long history of pairing the transfer of Iranian funds with Tehran’s release of hostages, including in 1981, 1991, and 2016, with the implementation of the nuclear deal.”
In each case, “the United States reached financial settlements with Iran related to disputes originating with the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which were directly or indirectly connected with the release of Americans held hostage in Iran or Lebanon.”
In January 2016, four Americans were released from prison in Iran after the US government agreed to pay Tehran $400 million, plus interest of $1.3 billion, ostensibly returning funds that had been deposited in the US to buy weapons but frozen by the Jimmy Carter administration after the 1979 revolution.
It was, after all, in the very early days of the new republic that the Iranian regime perfected its cash-for-hostages strategy.On Nov. 4, 1979, following the overthrow of the shah, Iranian students seized the US Embassy in Tehran and took 66 Americans hostage, 55 of whom would remain in captivity for 444 days.
Their release, when it finally came, had a price tag — the return to Iran of about $12 billion in frozen assets.
In her article for The Atlantic, Shelly Kittleson wrote that she had been “warned multiple times over my years of reporting from Iraq that I might be targeted for kidnapping or assassination” but “none of the previous warnings had been followed by any attempts.”
It has also emerged that before her kidnapping she had been warned by the US authorities about a specific threat to her, that her name was on a list, and that Kataib Hezbollah was said to be plotting to kidnap or kill female journalists.
By orchestrating the performative capture and release of Kittleson, Tehran has fired a warning shot. The next Westerner to fall into the hands of one of its proxies might not be so lucky.