Green Zone
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Image:Baghdad - airport and green zone.jpg The Green Zone is a 10 km² (4 mile²) area in central Baghdad that is the main base for coalition officials in Iraq. Its official name under the Iraq interim government is the International Zone. While this was to be the designation—and they pushed hard to keep people from using the old one—as of early 2006, the term "Green Zone" is back in full swing and even creeping back into official publications. The contrasting Red Zone particularly refers to parts of Baghdad immediately outside the perimeter but is also loosly applied to all unsecured areas outside the off-site military posts. Both terms, (Red and Green Zone), originated as military designations.
The area was originally home to the villas of government officials, several government ministries, and number of palaces of Saddam Hussein and his family. The largest of these was the Republican Palace that was Saddam's primary seat of power.
The region was taken by American forces in April 2003, in some of the heaviest fighting in Baghdad. Few American soldiers were killed but many Iraqis died. In the lead up to invasion Saddam and most of the other residents of the area fled fearing arrest by Coalition forces or reprisals by Iraqis.
While most of the ministry buildings had been destroyed by airstrikes, this left a sizeable number of buildings in central Baghdad abandoned. The Coalition Provisional Authority administrators who arrived on the heels of the invading forces decided this left them ideal for use by Coalition administrators. Jay Garner, head of the reconstruction team, set up his headquarters in the Republican Palace; other villas were taken by groups of government officials and private contractors. Eventually some five thousand officials and civil contractors settled in the area. While it seemed logical at the time, the decision to locate the Coalition headquarters within the most prominent symbols of Ba'athist power has since been criticized.
The abandoned buildings were not only attractive to Coalition forces, but also to homeless Iraqis. Among these were individuals who had lost their homes in the conflict, but most were urban poor who had been homeless or in slums before the war and saw moving into the abandoned houses as a sizeable increase in their standard of living. They felt that since they were not Ba'athist, they had as much right to the houses as the Coalition authorities to the vacated houses. There continue to be some five thousand of these Iraqis living in the Green Zone.
The Green Zone is also home to a small garrison of American troops who guard it and man the checkpoints leading to it. Some of the original inhabitants who did not flee also continue to live in the area.
As the insurgency in Baghdad escalated the Green Zone became increasingly restricted, eventually being made strictly off limits to all but a few privileged Iraqis, for fear of terrorism. High concrete blast walls, (T-Walls) and barbed wire were built around the Zone to guard against attack by insurgents. This has led the insurgents to frequently shell the Green Zone with mortars and rockets, though these attacks cause few casualties. In October 2004 it was also hit by two suicide bombings. It has also annoyed ordinary Iraqis, as a large swath of the central city is off-limits to them, making travel difficult.
Since the handover of sovereignty to Iraqis, many of the facilities in the Green Zone have been turned over to the new Iraqi government. It is still the base for western private military contractors, and home to the U.S. and British embassies. The permanent U.S. embassy is currently being built in the southern Green Zone, overlooking the Tigris River.
Robert Fisk calls the Baghdad Green Zone, a "crusader castle". [1]