Threats before kidnap

AN American journalist who was kidnapped in Baghdad had tried to cross from Syria into Iraq three weeks earlier and was initially turned back, an Iraqi official said yesterday.

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US and Iraqi officials said Shelly Renee Kittleson had also been warned of threats against her in the days before her abduction. A freelance journalist who has worked for years in Iraq and Syria, Kittleson was kidnapped from a street in the Iraqi capital Tuesday and remains missing.

Hussein Alawi, an adviser to Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, said Kittleson had sought to enter via the al-Qaim crossing from Syria on March 9 but was turned back because she did not have a press work permit and because of security concerns due to “the escalation of the war and aerial projectiles over Iraqi airspace as a result of the war on Iran.”