My guess, Wolfgang, is that individual human shields sign up to serve for certain periods of time, and then they return to their normal lives. So I would imagine that the particular ones you mentioned in your opening post were telling the truth about why they aren't doing it any more. I doubt that most people who get involved in this sort of thing do it for indefinite periods of time. It's probably more of a rotating personnel kind of thing like the military or the Peace Corps. But the organizations that are doing this work are still very much involved, just not in Iraq.