Riverbend, the famed Iraqi blogger who has transfixed English-speaking readers with her sensitive, introspective, and brutally honest chronicling of life in the war zone on her "Baghdad Burning" blog has announced that her family will finally flee Iraq in hopes of safely surviving the war in a foreign land.

In her post announcing the decision, Riverbend shows how excruciating a process it is for a family to make that decision to flee insecurity for a future of uncertainty.

I remember Baghdad before the war--one could live anywhere. We didn't know what our neighbors were--we didn't care. No one asked about religion or sect. No one bothered with what was considered a trivial topic: are you Sunni or Shia? You only asked something like that if you were uncouth and backward. Our lives revolve around it now. Our existence depends on hiding it or highlighting it--depending on the group of masked men who stop you or raid your home in the middle of the night.

On a personal note, we've finally decided to leave. I guess I've known we would be leaving for a while now. We discussed it as a family dozens of times. At first, someone would suggest it tentatively because, it was just a preposterous idea--leaving ones home and extended family--leaving ones country--and to what? To where?....

I know that leaving the country and starting a new life somewhere else-as yet unknown-is such a huge thing that it should dwarf every trivial concern. The funny thing is that it’s the trivial that seems to occupy our lives. We discuss whether to take photo albums or leave them behind. Can I bring along a stuffed animal I've had since the age of four? Is there room for E.'s guitar? What clothes do we take? Summer clothes? The winter clothes too? What about my books? What about the CDs, the baby pictures?

The problem is that we don't even know if we'll ever see this stuff again. We don't know if whatever we leave, including the house, will be available when and if we come back. There are moments when the injustice of having to leave your country, simply because an imbecile got it into his head to invade it, is overwhelming. It is unfair that in order to survive and live normally, we have to leave our home and what remains of family and friends... And to what?

It's difficult to decide which is more frightening- car bombs and militias, or having to leave everything you know and love, to some unspecified place for a future where nothing is certain.