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The Green Zone in Baghdad

"The Green Zone" is a nickname for the International Zone in Baghdad. From April, 2003 until January 1, 2009, it was under the control of Coalition forces, but is now under the full control of Iraq. It continues to be the location of the embassies of the United States and several other Coalition members.

How It's Used

“It would be easy, he says, to retreat into the Green Zone, the high-security swath of Baghdad housing the occupation authority headquarters and the Governing Council’s offices. The area is protected by U.S. forces, and ordinary Iraqis are forbidden to enter without permission.”

“The attack on the U.S.-run Al Rasheed hotel, which sits in a vast ‘green zone’ of Baghdad that is off-limits to ordinary Iraqis, marks a shift in the guerrillas’ tactics. Rather than just hit-and-run ambushes, they are using more standoff weapons such as mortars, rockets and remote-controlled explosive devices that allow resistance fighters to strike without being hit in return.”

“What’s life like for an American businessman or contractor in Iraq? If you’re from Halliburton’s Kellogg Brown & Root, you’re installed in the prized Green Zone, Baghdad’s Beverly Hills. That’s the four-square-mile patch of downtown where the CPA is headquartered under heavy U.S. military guard. Bechtel is there as well, holed up in Uday Hussein’s former villa on the Tigris. But smaller companies or those that arrived too late to scoop up prime real estate—that’s wherever the U.S. military is—are dug into one of the many hotels around town under heavy guard. You’ll know you’re approaching one when you see tall concrete barriers, known as blast walls, and chicanes, which are obstacle courses designed to create traffic jams.”

“The Green Zone offers some degree of sanctuary from the war. Except for the mortar shells that are lobbed into it, and the bombs that periodically go off around it (and, on couple of occasions, inside it), Iraq’s violence is something of an abstraction to the Americans who live there. But at the barricaded entrances where people and cars are checked, where the Zone ends and Iraq begins, the Iraqi soldiers are often edgy…

“At one point, Khalilzad [the U.S. ambassador to Iraq] mentioned having gone into the ‘Red Zone’ to visit a cleric. [Adnan] Pachachi [a Sunni secularist who served as Iraq’s foreign minister and U.N. Ambassador in the nineteen-sixties] looked perplexed, and asked him, ‘What is that, the Red Zone?’  Momentarily embarrassed, Khalilzad explained that he had meant to say ‘Baghdad.’”

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