WASHINGTON -- The last time I was in Baghdad, I'd gone to fetch my dog. Wiley had stayed with me for most of the two years I'd been based in Iraq as a reporter, and now, 10 months after my departure, it was time for Wiley to leave, too.

But as my taxi pulled up to Baghdad International Airport, with Wiley in a plastic kennel propped sideways in the open trunk, I worried about what lay ahead. We'd arrive at the airport, and I'd be thrust, I feared, into a role I did not want but could not avoid -- the American carrying her dog away from a war zone while desperate Iraqis had no way out.

Setting Wiley's cage on the airport sidewalk, I felt a familiar tension, when I had felt at a previous journalistic post, in Liberia. I was determined to take care of my dog, my responsibility. But I pictured myself succumbing to the disorder of the crowded and corrupt airport, trampling desperate people to push Wiley's kennel onto the plane.

The best option

Taking Wiley with me to Baghdad had been the best of a gamut of bad pet-care options. When I'd left Dakar, Senegal, my previous posting, I'd paid my old house guards to take care of her, but when I returned on a visit I found her wasting away.

In Baghdad, at first, Wiley struggled to adjust. She had no experience of sectarian warfare. She would freeze like a rookie, hunkering where she stood in the yard, when a car bomb blew up nearby or a mortar round landed.

But Wiley settled in. She spent her time in the garden, where a plaster Greek lady stood pouring empty air from a broken fountain ever since U.S. troops rolled in and the owners of the house fled. Through the Iraq summers, Wiley would lie panting in the flower bed. When two truck bombs blew up outside our compound one day, we used the same flower bed to bury an elbow that came flying into our yard.

When something blew, Wiley learned to scramble inside the bureau, where several of us worked and lived. As soon as a boom shook our house, the dog would be indoors among us. She would twine herself around my legs as Americans and Iraqis dashed around, all of us trying to figure out what had just been hit, the more traditional among the women staffers hitting the floor in a faint. Wiley would lock her eyes on mine, beseeching mercy in the way dogs do.

Return to the U.S.

Finally in October, after 21 months in Baghdad, it was time for us to go. My cousins in Oklahoma had agreed to take Wiley. I was headed for my next post, Cairo.

Iraqi staffers, normally incredibly stoic, made uncharacteristic jokes about smuggling themselves out in my suitcases -- hiding in my dog kennel and flying cargo to Oklahoma with Wiley.

But hiding in suitcases was about the only way Iraqis could make it to the United States. The Bush administration had promised to take in more Iraqi refugees over the last year. But that week it announced how many Iraqis it had managed to allow in:1,600.

Syria, which had taken in hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, announced that same week new visa restrictions for them. More than ever, Iraqis had nowhere to run.

Wiley's trip home went without incident, and I turned back toward Cairo.

When I arrived, I received an e-mail from one of my cousins in Oklahoma. The subject line was "ugh." It had been a hard e-mail for him to write.

Wiley had disappeared, my cousin wrote. Weeks of searching the neighborhood and dog pounds had failed to find her.

Mountain lions, my cousin suggested. Speeding cars.

I thought of other possibilities. Last seen in the back seat of a limousine, I told myself, eating foie gras out of a tin and heading for the home of a new owner who could keep her alive. Believed to be hoofing it cross-country, trying to get back home, to safety, to Baghdad.