U.S. Walls Off Its Corner of Baghdad, Annoying Some Neighbors
By JAMES GLANZ
Published: July 5, 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 4 - Iraqis call it Assur, the Fence. In English
everyone calls it the Wall, and in the past two years it has grown and
grown until it has become an almost continuous rampart, at least 10
miles in circumference, around the seat of American power in Baghdad.
Adam Nadel/Polaris, for The New York Times
Abdul Kareem Jabbar, with family members in his backyard, as the newly
fortified barrier loomed over them. He sometimes finds it a nuisance.
A barrier commonly known as the Wall surrounds the Green Zone.
The wall is not a small factor in the lives of ordinary Iraqis outside
it. Khalid Daoud, an employee at the Culture Ministry, still looks in
disbelief at the barrier of 12-foot-high, five-ton slabs that cuts
through his garden.
A few months ago, he said, the American military arrived with a crane
and tore up the trees in his garden, smashed the low wall surrounding
it, swung the slabs into place and topped them with concertina wire.
Later they put up a 24-hour guard tower and a brilliant floodlight on
the other side. With their privacy gone, his wife and daughter must now
tend the garden in their abayas, or cloaks, and the family no longer
sleeps outside when electricity failures at night shut down the air
conditioning.
"I feel like it's going to choke me," Mr. Daoud said of the wall.
This is one snapshot of life for countless Iraqis who live, work, shop
and kick soccer balls around in the shadow of the structure. Many
despise the wall, a few are strangely drawn to it, but no one can
ignore it. Fortifications of one kind or another abound in the city,
but there is nothing that compares to the snaking, zigzagging loop that
is the wall.
Sometimes likened to the Berlin Wall by those who are not happy about
its presence, the structure cleanly divides the relative safety of the
Green Zone that includes Saddam Hussein's old palace and ministry
complex, now used by the American authorities and heavily patrolled by
American troops, from the Red Zone - most of the rest of Baghdad -
where security ranges from adequate to nonexistent.
But for all the problems faced by residents across the city, the
neighborhoods within a few blocks of the wall have become a world
apart. Mortar rounds and rockets fired at the Green Zone fall short and
land there. Suicide bombers, unable to breach the wall, blow themselves
up in shops just outside it. And the maze of checkpoints, blocked
streets and American armor may be thicker here than anywhere else in
Baghdad.
"We are the new Palestine," said Saman Abdel Aziz Rahman, owner of the
Serawan kebab restaurant, by the northern reaches of the wall.
Two weeks ago, a man walked into a restaurant near the Serawan and blew
himself up at lunchtime, killing 23 people, wounding 36 and sending
pieces of flesh all the way to Mr. Rahman's establishment.
Lt. Col. Steven A. Boylan, director of the main press information
center in Baghdad, said construction of the wall was guided by "an
overall force protection plan."
An American contractor, Kellogg Brown & Root, builds sections of the
wall, Colonel Boylan said. He said he was not sure how complaints about
the wall were handled. But whatever the official protocol, residents
said it was no use trying to slow the placement of the slabs.
Mr. Daoud, whose garden was ruined, said he had complained and had
simply been told that the city had approved the work and there was
nothing he could do.
But one of the paradoxes of the wall is that while many are repelled by
it, others are drawn by the feeling that they will be protected by the
overwhelming might that lies just on the other side. American foot
patrols, rarely seen elsewhere in Baghdad, are fairly routine along the
outside of the wall, and residents know that any sustained guerrilla
incursion near the zone would draw a swarm of Apache helicopters and
Humvees, as well as a tank or two if necessary.
"It's good and it's not good," said Abdul Kareem Jabbar, a government
employee whose backyard, swarming with clucking chickens and his
extended family's children, abuts the wall not far from the Serawan
restaurant.
"What's good about it - it's a safe and secure area," Mr. Jabbar said.
"And what's bad about it," he said, pointing over his shoulder toward
the house next door, "a mortar fell over there the other day."
Other than that, the biggest nuisance Mr. Jabbar has faced is what he
said were empty liquor bottles tossed over from the Green Zone onto his
family's cars.
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