Princeton Ph.D. student Elizabeth Tsurkov was released from captivity in Iraq on September 9 and has since been reunited with family members. She was abducted in March 2023 while conducting fieldwork in Iraq for her doctoral dissertation and just days after undergoing emergency spinal surgery in Baghdad. Ms. Tsurkov’s kidnappers were widely reported to be Kataib Hezbollah, an Iraqi Shi’a militia with ties to the Iraqi government. Throughout her captivity, her family was deprived of information about her health and conditions of confinement.

Ms. Tsurkov is a doctoral student in Princeton University’s Department of Politics, where she conducts research on conflict and post-conflict situations in the Middle East, with a focus on Syria and Iraq. She has also long been actively engaged in human rights advocacy in support of Palestinians, refugees and migrants, torture survivors, and historically marginalized communities in the region. In addition to her studies, she is a non-resident fellow at the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy, a Washington-based research organization, and a journalist. Ms. Tsurkov has dual Israeli-Russian citizenship and is a legal resident of the United States.

Ms. Tsurkov’s family advocated tirelessly for her release including through outreach to the academic and human rights communities.