BAGHDAD, Iraq — The U.S. journalist Jill Carroll, weeping and veiled, appeared on a new videotape aired Monday by al-Jazeera, and the Arab television station said she appealed for the release of all Iraqi women prisoners.
The video was dated Saturday — two days after the U.S. military released five Iraqi women from custody.
Carroll, 28, was crying and wore a conservative Islamic veil as she spoke to the camera, sitting in front of a yellow and black tapestry. The al-Jazeera newscaster said she appealed for U.S. and Iraqi authorities to free all women prisoners to help "in winning her release." (See photo on A1.)
At one point, Carroll's cracking voice can be heard from behind the newsreader's voice. All that can be heard is Carroll saying, "... hope for the families ..."
The U.S. military released the women last Thursday and was believed be holding about six more. It was unclear how many women were held by Iraqi authorities.
In a related development, al-Jazeera also aired a video Monday of al-Qaida's No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri in which he mocked President Bush as a "failure" in the war on terror, called him a "butcher" for killing innocent Pakistanis in a miscarried airstrike and chastised the United States for not accepting Osama bin Laden's offer of a truce.
Al-Zawahri, wearing white robes and a white turban and speaking in a forceful and angry voice, also threatened a new attack in the United States — "God willing, on your own land."
The video, broadcast a day before Bush delivers his State of the Union address, provided the first concrete evidence that al-Zawahri was still alive after the Jan. 13 airstrike in eastern Pakistan that targeted him but killed four other al-Qaida leaders and 13 villagers.
Carroll, a freelance reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, was seized Jan. 7 by the previously unknown Revenge Brigades, which threatened to kill her unless all women prisoners were released. Al-Jazeera did not report any deadline or threat to kill her Monday.
Al-Jazeera editor Yasser Thabit said the station received the tape Monday and that it was between two to three minutes long, but only a fraction of the footage was telecast.
In a statement, the Monitor again appealed for her release.
"Anyone with a heart will feel distressed that an innocent woman like Jill Carroll would be treated in the manner shown in the latest video aired by Al-Jazeera," the statement said. "We add our voice to those of Arabs around the world, and especially to those in Iraq, who have condemned this act of kidnapping. We ask that she be returned to the protection of her family immediately."
Carroll's father, who lives in North Carolina, has said he will have no comment until her release.
In other developments:
U.S. troops clashed throughout the day with insurgents west of Baghdad. The clashes west of Baghdad occurred in Ramadi, capital of the insurgent-ridden Anbar province, and began when gunmen fired at least five rocket-propelled grenade rounds and rifles at U.S. Army soldiers, a military spokesman said.
In the Kurdish-run city of Sulaimaniyah, the country's health minister Abdel Mutalib Mohammed announced the first confirmed case of bird flu in the Middle East. World Health Organization officials said tests showed that a 15-year-old girl who died this month in northern Iraq suffered from the deadly H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus.
ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt, who were seriously injured in a roadside bombing Sunday, were being treated by a trauma team at a U.S. military hospital in Germany.
"They're both very seriously injured, but stable," said Col. Bryan Gamble, commander of the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in western Germany.