“They’re cute, furry, and more dangerous than you think,” one command bulletin this year said, speaking of cats and dogs. Maj. Robert A. Goodman, chief of veterinary services for the Army’s 248th Medical Detachment, highlighted the rabies threat. “There’s nothing compassionate about compassionate feeding,” he said. “They’re increasing the risk of disease.”

Still, many troops in Afghanistan and Iraq ignore the ban.

Other bulletins from the American command have reviewed the ethics of feeding strays, saying that animal lovers among the troops do more harm than good when they accustom cats and dogs to a regular supply of food and affection — only to abandon them when they rotate home, leaving the animals depleted in their instinct to fend for themselves. At The Times’s compound, too, we have never been certain how long we will remain in Iraq. But in my mind, at least, the benefits to the cats and our own morale outweighed the longer-term concerns, the more so because conditions beyond our walls seemed to offer scant prospects that most of them, denied our shelter, would survive for long anyway.

On that bitter night in 2005, I went a step further. Making my way to a veranda overlooking the spot where the kitten was crying, I “bombed” it with a feather duvet off an absent colleague’s bed before it could scoot into an inaccessible recess in a garden wall. Thus did we acquire Scooter — white, with flecks of ginger and tabby, a female of extraordinary agility, who found a way, when still no bigger than the palm of my hand, to leap and claw her way out of a cardboard packing case five feet high.

Watching her, and the two litters of kittens she had over the following 18 months, offered we humans a new reaction to the cacophony of the war. The bloodiest suicide bombings, even miles away, have the sound and feel of the apocalypse, causing humans to freeze, no matter how often they experience it. Cats need to hear it only once. As they skitter to the safety of trees and bushes, they enter the blast and the tremor on the hard drive of their brains. On the next occasion, come the blast, they barely stir.

Image NOBILITY Iraqs strays inherit land said to have given rise to all domestic cats. Credit... Joao Silva for The New York Times

Mongrels though they are, our Baghdad cats, we learned from a recent study in the journal Science, have a noble lineage of their own — as inheritors of the same terrain occupied by the felines that were the forebears of all domestic cats, wild families that lived along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates more than 10,000 years ago.

But Scooter had her own ticket out of Iraq booked from the moment I clutched her in the duvet’s folds. By August of this year, she had three 12-week-old kittens, each bearing the name of an American war machine — Apache (Patch, for short), Bradley and Stryker. The names were chosen, in part, in the hope that we might eventually find American veterans of the war, now home, to adopt them. We already have a cat in England, Scuzzie, who joined the family when he strayed into our home in New Delhi 13 summers ago to escape a monsoon, and he exhibits claws-out hostility to any other cat entering his domain.