This eyewitness account reveals the truth about Baghdad’s Red Zone during the American occupation, and describes the reality of daily life as the city descended into bloody civil war. How do you cheer on your national football team when you’re terrified to step outside your front door? What’s it like to go to the shops when your biggest fear is being blown up by a suicide bomber? Or risk being shot at a roadblock when you drive your pregnant wife to hospital?
As the Daily Telegraph’s Baghdad bureau chief, Oliver Poole first arrived in Iraq in 2003, crossing the Kuwait border in the bank of a US armoured vehicle. Once in Baghdad his home would become a hotel room in the middle of the city’s Red Zone, one of the most dangerous places on earth. He tells how the war changed this young Englishman’s life – and also the life of his interpreter Ahmed, whose relations were among those slaughtered and who ultimately had to flee Iraq – with Oliver’s help – in a vehicle filled with his possessions and family.
Oliver travelled with British and US troops, witnessed first-hand the bloody impact of car bombs and had his own offices destroyed by a suicide bomber. Finally in November 2006, with his newspaper closing down his office, he joined the masses escaping Iraq through Baghdad airport.
This is the story of that war, and that city, during that time.