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Hello and welcome to a special edition of the News Hour podcast with me, Tim Franks.
It's special because it's devoted to a single conversation I had with a remarkable guest.
She's Elizabeth Serkov,
an Israeli-Russian woman who was held captive for two and a half years by militants in Iraq.
She was released in September and is currently recuperating in central Israel.
You'll get a sense of her ordeal, of some of the abuse,
the torture she suffered during the course of this interview,
and the usual warning that you might find some of those details distressing.
But this 39-year-old doctoral student from Princeton University in the US who was conducting fieldwork in Baghdad when she was kidnapped back in March 2023,
she also has some really interesting things to say about Iraq and about the region.
My first question to her though, given all that she has gone through, how is she?
Health-wise, yeah,
I'm suffering from a slew of problems due to the torture and the torture occurred at the start of my captivity which lasted you know for 903 days so after particularly the tortures herniated my back I became quite immobile and that also contributed to the muscle atrophy and I have nerve damage on top of that so my health is is not great quite restricted in what I can do but Mentally,
I'm quite well.
I was in solitary this whole time but after four and a half months,
I was moved from a facility where I was severely tortured to a facility where I was fed enough and I was treated well with the exception of being in solitary and not seeing the sun this whole time and not having a window.
So therefore, Even captivity, I had time to recover, even if, you know,
not fully, mentally, emotionally, from the really horrible period of the torture.
Can I ask you, and I realise this comes loaded with all sorts of potential problems,