The last public news of him came in February 2007, when a Shiite militant group called Ahl al-Bayt Brigades released a 10-second video of him on the Internet.

The military is committed to bringing al-Taie home, said U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. David Russell, a spokesman for the Multi-National Force-Iraq.

“The universal expectation that no one will be left behind is a fundamental article of faith that underpins the motivation and confidence of every U.S. service member deploying to a foreign duty location,” Russell wrote in an e-mail.

Russell declined to release any details of the search for al-Taie, citing policy.

Al-Taie’s parents, who live in the Michigan college town of Ann Arbor, declined to be interviewed.

...Keith Maupin says al-Taie's relatives have to have faith that he's still alive and coming home.  Maupin says prayer helped sustain him and his family as they rallied public attention to help find their son, Army Reserve Staff Sgt. Matt Maupin, who was missing for nearly four years.

At the time of al-Taie's dissaperance in 2006, the New York Times wrote of his unique position as an Iraq-born new American citizen who passed up a chance to return home from Iraq, instead choosing to serve another six months.  The article also tells of al-Taie's occasional practice of sneaking out of Baghdad's Green Zone, changing out of his uniform, and visiting his wife's family.

For half his life, Ahmed Kousay al-Taie has been a man of two worlds, one being this leafy college town west of Detroit, where he joined the Army, and the other being the crumbling avenues of western Baghdad, where he grew up...

...After the attacks of Sept. 11, Specialist Taie felt his prospects growing darker, his parents said. As an Arab immigrant who was not yet a citizen, he found it hard to get meaningful work, his parents said. In November 2003, he returned to Iraq for the first time, along with his mother. “I was thinking to find a girl for him to marry,” she said.

Indeed, postwar Iraq had drawn back several members of the Taie family. Specialist Taie’s father, an engineer, returned to Iraq in June 2003, to help with reconstruction.

When his parents returned to the United States, in June 2004, the son remained in Baghdad. “He said, ‘I am very comfortable with the people here. I have my friends. People respect me,’ ” Mr. Taie recalled his son as saying.

He had also met Ms. Abdul-Satar.

He returned to Ann Arbor, and in September 2005 he enlisted in the Army. Completing basic and specialized training to become an interpreter in Fort Hood, Tex., he was sent to Iraq last November, a military spokesman in Baghdad said.