This week, the U.N.'s refugee agency announced that nearly 4.5 million Iraqis have fled the country or have been displaced inside Iraq.

The agency's latest report says 1,000 Iraqis are still leaving their homes every day, either for the relative safety of communities segregated by sect within Iraq, or to try their luck at crossing into Syria or Jordan, which already have an estimated 2.2 million Iraqi refugees. In other words, the recent drop in major insurgent attacks has done little to stem the flow of refugees.

More bad news for Iraqis desperately seeking a sanctuary comes out of Syria, which until recently had been the sole Arab nation to admit Iraqis without a visa.

Now, reports are emerging that Syria is sealing its borders to most Iraqis and implementing new visa rules that could result in the deportation of some 1.5 million refugees. Some of my Iraqi friends in Damascus tried to remain optimistic that Syria would cave to UN pressure and refrain from beginning deportations, while others said the threat of a one-way ticket to Baghdad is easily removed by greasing the right palms. Nobody sounded especially confident.

This week, I got an inkling of the panic that's breaking out among Iraqis over what they'll do if they find themselves trapped in Baghdad or forcibly returned to their bloody homeland from Damascus or Amman. In the space of four days, I've heard from several Iraqi friends seeking escape routes.

They were from all different backgrounds -- Sunni/Shiite, rich/poor, professional/blue collar -- but the conversation was the same. They began with Eid greetings, polite inquiries about Cairo weather, and then tearful pleas as to whether I could help them finagle visas to Egypt.

Sadly, the answer was no.

I've tried for our own staff members in Baghdad, I told them. My Egyptian colleague and I visited the foreign ministry and were told that Egypt is closed to Iraqis now because so many had come in on tourist visas and stayed. The Cairo districts of 6th of October and Nasr City are flooded with Iraqi refugees, mainly Sunnis who got out early and with the contents of their savings accounts.

In a few cases, we resorted to unofficial methods. A good friend, a wealthy Iraqi businessman who's lived in Cairo for 16 years, once offered to sponsor some of my Iraqi colleagues by listing them as employees of his construction company in order to get them work visas. He paid bribes to Egyptian interior ministry officials and invented job titles for the "employees" he'd never met. Alas, another dead end: large companies operating in Egypt have to fill a certain quota of Egyptian employees before they can bring in labor from abroad, and the businessman didn't have enough.

Again and again, I recounted these stories this week to my friends on the other end of crackly Iraqna phone lines. Sitting in my bright, air-conditioned office, I felt the distraught voices cut right to my heart as I listened to Waleed, Musab, Rana, Mohammed, and so many others.

I wish I could do something. You know I would do anything for you after all the help you gave me in Baghdad. We haven't forgotten you, please believe me. If I see any opportunity...

Words meant to be reassuring sounded empty, especially after they were repeated so many times to so many people who risked their lives -- as correspondents or sources -- to make sure our readers in Wichita or Sacramento or Miami got a daily update from the front lines.

There was never anger on the other end of the line -- just the resigned acceptance of yet another "no" by Iraqis who've grown very familiar with the word. No security, no electricity, no school, no Sunnis, no Shiites.

The conversations invariably ended with heavy sighs and an Iraqi expression: "Shi'nsawwi? Allah kareem."

What's there to do? God is generous.