Following her capture by the Taliban, when friends and family feared for her life, former Northern Echo reporter Yvonne Ridley has converted to Islam and is making a new life for herself in the Middle East, she tells BBC correspondent Jayne Margetts.

FORMER colleagues at The Northern Echo weren't in the least bit surprised when they heard Yvonne Ridley had been captured by the Taliban. Always willing to go that little bit further for a good story, the former Echo reporter was covering the war in Afghanistan for the Sunday Express. She had travelled to Pakistan but had been refused a visa to enter Afghanistan. Undeterred, she disguised herself as an Afghan woman but was intercepted trying to cross the border.

Accused of spying, she was held captive for two weeks but released on the instructions of leader Sheikh Mullah Omar the day after the United States started bombing Kabul. But her two weeks in prison changed her life in an unexpectedly positive way.

Tonight, Yvonne speaks to BBC One's Inside Out about her new life in the Qatar capital of Doha. She says she cannot recognise her old self since flying off from the UK, leaving her job as a newspaper reporter and becoming a practising Muslim.

The independent, feisty war correspondent formally converted to her new faith two months ago and has now given up alcohol, prays five times a day and visits a mosque every Friday.

She has a ten-year-old daughter, Daisy, whom she hopes will be able to join her when she finishes primary school next year.

"I can barely recognise Yvonne Ridley prior to September 11. Personally, I think I have been a bit calmer, more reflective. Certainly, I am a bit more tolerant than I used to be and now the thought of spending the day reading a book and doing some writing and relaxing on my own is great," Yvonne tells me. Speaking from her home in Doha, surrounded by desert, she adds: "A place like this would have driven me crazy two or three years ago, but now I can really enjoy the isolation and beauty and be quite relaxed."

Yvonne was captured by the Taliban after a camera, banned by the regime, fell out of the burkha she was wearing. "I just thought the bad cops were going to appear at any time with electrodes and torture instruments or I was going to be taken out and shot," says Yvonne.

But her time in the hands of the Taliban sowed the seeds for a huge change in her life. While the British Government, her friends, family and work colleagues were working to have her freed, Yvonne tried to secure her own release by offering to read The Koran - and this became the start of her conversion to Islam.

Yvonne says western perceptions of female oppression under Islam are mistaken. "I started reading The Koran and it's absolutely brilliant. It could have been written yesterday for today. It makes it crystal clear that women are equal in spirituality, worth and education."

Yvonne is now also working for the Arab satellite news station, Al Jazeera, on its English-language website and is bullish about her new employers, who have been criticised in the West for their coverage of the Iraq War.

"If somebody had said ten years ago that I would leave newspapers and go for the Internet, I would have said 'Don't be so crazy'. But this is really a very exciting, 24/7 operation. Every minute is a deadline. If something breaks, we can put it straight out onto the Internet.

"The reality of war is that people die and, quite frankly, I can't see the difference between the corpse of an Iraqi soldier and the corpse of an English soldier. The value of life is exactly the same and yet western TV felt it was quite okay to picture dead Iraqi soldiers and humiliated Iraqi prisoners of war. But as soon as Al Jazeera turned the tables, there was outrage. Absolute outrage. And the hypocrisy was open for all to see."

Yvonne believes Al Jazeera has given the Arab world a previously unheard voice and her experience in war zones has made her a vocal, anti-war campaigner.

"That's when I realised the futility of war because these missiles can't differentiate between civilians and the military; women and children and soldiers," she says. "If I can use any of my 15 minutes of notoriety, celebrity, for good, then I will."

* Inside Out is broadcast on BBC1 in the North East and Cumbria tonight at 7.30pm. A longer documentary of this programme will be broadcast across the UK on BBC Four later this year.