The whereabouts of Dorothy Parvaz are suddenly more confusing than ever. At first, all anyone knew was that she had gone missing in Syria—no one’s heard from her since her plane to Damascus landed on April 29. Six days later, Syrian authorities announced they were holding her. Considering what’s going on in Syria right now, that wasn’t exactly reassuring, but at least a government had acknowledged she was alive and her location had been established.

But now, the Syrian government is claiming through its embassy in Washington, DC, that Parvaz has been in Iran for about 12 days and that they held her in Syria for “less than 48 hours” before dropping her into the hands of the local Iranian consul in Damascus, who promptly put Parvaz on a plane to Tehran. Which is odd, because a day after Parvaz supposedly got to Tehran, the Iranian foreign minister stated at a news conference that he was unaware of Parvaz’s plight, saying: “We demand the government of Syria to look into this.”

Parvaz, a journalist for Al Jazeera and formerly a reporter and columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has American, Canadian, and Iranian citizenship. Iran, though, is probably a much worse place for the detained journalist than Syria (if Iran is indeed where Parvaz has landed). Iran’s diplomatic relations with the United States are almost nonexistent—George W. Bush famously named Iran as part of the “axis of evil”—and according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Iran was tied with China in 2010 as the top worldwide jailer of journalists, locking up 34 journalists, some for as many as 15 years, on charges like “propagating against the regime,” “insulting the supreme leader,” and “creating public anxiety.” Some sentences included physical punishment (“34 lashes,” “74 lashes”). Since 1997, according to the CPJ, four journalists have been killed in Iran, including a 28-year-old blogger who was charged by the state with insulting two ayatollahs.

Parvaz herself, in a 2006 P-I article that took her back to Iran to revisit the place she was born, worried that she’d make a tempting target for the country’s security apparatus. “I do look sketchy on paper,” Parvaz began, continuing:

I was born in Iran to an Iranian father and an American mother. At age 10, I relocated to Dubai with my father, stepmother and sister and lived there almost four years, spending summers in Iran visiting my grandmother. We moved again in 1985, this time to Canada, where we became citizens. I finally got my American passport at age 23. I’m an Iranian with two Western passports—and I work for one of the Great Satan’s newspapers.
Fact is, the Iranian government wouldn’t have to justify to either America or Canada what it might do with me.

These days, she doesn’t work for “one of the Great Satan’s newspapers” anymore (the Seattle P-I stopped printing in 2009), but she did try to get around Syria’s ban on foreign journalists by entering the country on her Iranian passport (the Syrian government claims it was expired). That could give the Iranian government a pretext to now treat her as it would any other Iranian journalist, the kind of thing Parvaz was getting at when she wrote, “The Iranian government wouldn’t have to justify to either America or Canada what it might do with me.”

Plus, Parvaz’s past affiliation with the Seattle P-I could still prove problematic—if the Iranians continue to misunderstand what the newspaper was about. In Between Two Worlds, a book by American journalist Roxana Saberi chronicling her five-month detention in Iran in 2009, Saberi wrote about her interrogations. During one of the interrogations, she was asked about various journalism world contacts, and one of those contacts, she wrote, “was a journalist friend who had e-mailed me a few weeks earlier from America.”

Saberi continued, describing the interrogation:

“We know he works for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer,” one of the agents said.
“Yes,” I said. “He’s a photographer there.”
“That paper is an arm of the CIA,” he continued.
“What do you mean?”
“It has the word intelligence in its name.”

Saberi ended up in a cell with a sign on the wall quoting the Iranian ayatollah Khomeini: “PRISONS MUST BE COLLEGES FOR HUMAN IMPROVEMENT.”

"I don’t know where she is,” Parvaz's fiancé, Todd Barker, said today from Vancouver, BC, where he’s with her family awaiting further word. “I just want to talk to her.”

The thing on everyone’s mind—is she safe?—is hard to bring up.

“She will be okay,” said Barker, refusing to imagine any other scenario.

“Every day that passes without word from her is worse,” said Parvaz’s friend and former P-I colleague Kristen Young. “We need to hear from her.”

Melanie McFarland, another former P-I colleague, said: “Think of someone you really care about, and think of them disappearing, and then you have differing reports as to where they are… It’s really confusing and it’s very emotionally trying, but the long and short of it is we don’t know where she is. I do believe she is being treated well, and we have to assume it—assuming anything else would just kind of be counterproductive.”

“We need to know what prison she’s in,” said Young. “The main thing is to know that she’s alive and safe and being cared for. Until we have that, we can’t rest.”

Part of what Young busies herself with these days is trying to generate more media attention for Parvaz’s plight. There’s been a lot so far (Barker said he’s been “overwhelmed” by it), but for some reason, the story of an American citizen missing in the Middle East—an American citizen who’s a female journalist and a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard—hasn’t made the network nightly newscasts. Perhaps it’s Parvaz’s multinational identity or simply her last name, which might make her seem foreign (“We really need people to understand that a US citizen is a US citizen, no matter where they go,” Young said). Or perhaps it’s fatigue with journalists going missing, or lack of sympathy connected to her employer, Al Jazeera—or, maybe, just limited media bandwidth and public attention spans.

“I think that the fact that she disappeared on the same day as the royal wedding and during the same weekend that Osama bin Laden was killed is more of an effect,” said McFarland, a former TV critic for the P-I. “Hearing that a journalist disappeared in the Middle East in the middle of Arab Spring was probably lower on the list for a lot of reasons. Does that make me understand? No. This is my friend. Just because she’s an international journalist doesn’t mean that she’s just another statistic you can ignore. An American woman who was trying to do her job has gone missing.”

McFarland continued: “If I heard Brian Williams talking about this, that would be nice. Why am I not seeing this on national nightly news? Katie Couric has a few more days left. Katie, do us a solid and report on a fellow American female journalist who’s gone missing.”

People all over the world are pressing for Parvaz’s release, from officials in Canada and the United States working diplomatic channels to those simply drawing attention to her plight via the “Free Dorothy Parvaz” Facebook page, which currently has over 12,000 followers. “She is not forgotten,” said Seattle congressman Jim McDermott at a Town Hall meeting on May 10. “We are working on it.”