Elizabeth Tsurkov, Princeton Student, Is Released From Iraq, Trump Says NYT | Top Stories Ronen Bergman, Patrick Kingsley and Aaron Boxerman 10 September 2025 at 05:22 Israel and Iraq confirmed the release of Elizabeth Tsurkov, a Russian-Israeli graduate student at Princeton who was kidnapped in Iraq in 2023 by the militant group Kataib Hezbollah. © Ahmad Mohamad/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesElizabeth Tsurkov, pictured in 2017, in Istanbul.