Susanne Osthoff, an aid worker/archeologist in Iraq for over a decade, and her driver, Shalid al-Shimani, were freed from captivity some 24 days after their abduction on November 25 . Osthoff is “safely in the care of the German embassy” in Baghdad and “she will leave Iraq in the very near future,” according to Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Jaeger, however, she has refused to discuss her experience. Al-Shimani’s whereabouts are unknown. According to Der Spiegel, Osthoff had been threatened with kidnapping “by a group close to al-Zarqawi” in October and that US soldiers had accompanied her from Mosul to Baghdad’s Green Zone to ensure her safety.

Germans have collectively shown little solidarity with Osthoff, particularly compared to Italy and France when its citizens were captured and released (Terrorist Incident and Terrorist Incident, respectively), as Osthoff had effectively disavowed her German connections: she is in no rush to return to her motherland; she had left Germany over 10 years ago and had severed most communication with her family in Bavaria; she was “fanatical” about Iraq and its people; and she has been called by the Berliner Zeitung a “dubious, unsympathetic, fanatical – a nightmare of a woman” whose attitudes toward her native home turned many Germans against her. Reuters suggested that many Germans coldly, yet pragmatically, felt she had “brought [the kidnapping] on herself by not heeding warnings.” This sentiment is widely and consistently felt by Germans when cases of kidnapping occur in dangerous places, as was witnessed in Algeria February/March 2003 .