Elizabeth Tsurkov, the Russian-Israeli academic who was kidnapped by the Shiite militia Kataeb Hezbollah in Iraq in 2023, issued on Friday her first public statement since being freed on September 10, thanking the US for orchestrating it.
“Finally, blessedly, free after 903 days in captivity,” Tsurkov wrote on X. “Thank you President Trump, for the decisive action that brought me home without anything given in return to the kidnappers, Kataeb Hezbollah.”
She said she was additionally “deeply grateful” to US Special Envoy for Hostage Response Adam Boehler and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio for their efforts.
“Thank you from the bottom of my heart to everyone who tried to help in any way,” added Tsurkov.
In a follow-up post in Hebrew, Tsurkov thanked Israel’s Hostage and Missing Persons Coordinator Gal Hirsch for working to secure her release, and her medical teams in Israel for the care she received upon her return.
“I have no words to describe the feeling of happiness of being free and being with my family,” she added. “All the hostages and their families deserve to experience this feeling.
She additionally posted a “guess who’s back” meme on the social media site.
Notably, Tsurkov did not thank Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Israel was said to have had very little to do with freeing her, and The Times of Israel reported following her release that without the intervention and pressure of the US administration, she might have remained in captivity in Iraq for many more years.
Tsurkov, a doctoral student at Princeton University and fellow at the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy, went missing in Iraq in March 2023.
She had likely entered Iraq on her Russian passport and had travelled to the country as part of her doctoral studies.
She was active on Twitter, where she has tens of thousands of followers and describes herself as “passionate about human rights.”
In Baghdad, she had focused on pro-Iran factions and the movement of Iraqi Shiite leader Moqtada Sadr as part of her research on the region.
She was abducted as she was leaving a cafe in the Iraqi capital’s Karrada neighborhood, an Iraqi intelligence source told AFP in 2023.