BAGHDAD — Standing side by side, dozens of 12-foot-tall concrete slabs loom over the median of an apartment-lined avenue near the Tigris River here.
The 100-foot-long barrier has sprung up to shield a side street from a potential car bomb. At the entrance to the street, more slabs stand next to a sandbagged guardhouse. Half a dozen guards, all carrying AK-47s and some wearing body armor, patrol the entrance.
This is not the Green Zone, the fortified district the U.S. military established in a bend of the Tigris River after the fall of Saddam Hussein two years ago.
The Sandi Group, an American company participating in a multimillion-dollar contract to advise the Iraqi government on law enforcement, has fashioned its own green zone across the river, one of more than 100 such private fortresses, large and small, across the city.
Although the U.S. military provides a safety cordon for the interim Iraqi government, the U.S. and British embassies and large contractors such as Parsons Corp. of Pasadena, many vulnerable foreign organizations do business outside its checkpoints.
When the insurgency's campaign of bombings and assassinations cast the city into a state of fear in mid-2003, it was up to the firms to provide their own security, spawning a private fortifications industry. Concrete blast walls, trucked around the capital in sections and hoisted into place by cranes, now surround many of the city's landmark buildings and lesser-known streets.
These compounds have angered and annoyed Baghdad residents, cutting them off from foreign offices and further obstructing the city's increasingly clogged streets.
"They closed most of the important roads," groused a cabdriver who would give only his nickname, Abu Sabbah. "Now the traffic is terrible. I think that the solution is to start removing these barriers and open some streets."
From a design and city-planning view, the walls are disastrous, said Mohammed Ridha, vice chairman of the architecture department at Baghdad University.
They have destroyed the city's continuity and are beginning to afflict the suburbs too, as homeowners, taking their cue from commercial interests, are blockading their houses, he said.
"When we need to improve the security situation of any building now, we put these blocks, any kind, any height, any amount of them," Ridha said. "We are feeling now these concrete blocks are reaching into our homes, so maybe we feel now we are alone in our homes."
