"First we taught them how to run a meeting," he told me in his Baghdad office.

Mr. Exline of Home Essentials said that he rarely visited his Baghdad office now because of safety concerns.

In a separate incident, a Jordanian reporter for Al Jazeera, the Arab satellite channel, was killed when a missile hit the channel's Baghdad office.

It was Oct. 27, 2003, and I stood before what remained of the Baghdad office of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Policing the Police General Peterson sat at a table in his Baghdad office in April and fingered a thick, white binder.

CARE already had pulled its foreigners out of Iraq last November, but still maintained 30 Iraqis in its Baghdad office.

"Any people with Special Operations backgrounds are in very high demand right now," said the manager of the Baghdad office of a British security company.

The interview had been arranged with the assistance of the Baghdad office of Moqtada al-Sadr.

The announcement came almost two weeks after a car bomb at its Baghdad office killed 12 people.

"Things are so confused," he said with a deep frown and slow shake of the head, sitting in his Baghdad office.