Red Zone: Five Bloody Years in Baghdad

Winner of the Montaigne Medal for 2009

“There's little good news, but [Oliver] Poole offers an insightful, sympathetic foreigner’s perspective on America's misadventures in Iraq.”—Kirkus Reviews

As the Iraq correspondent for the British newspaper the Daily Telegraph, Oliver Poole arrived in Baghdad in 2005. For the next two years his home was a hotel room in the middle of Baghdad’s “Red Zone,” one of the most dangerous places on earth.

Poole describes his daily life and how a lively city full of cafés was plunged into an unreported civil war. His own office was destroyed by a suicide bomber. He tells how the war changed his life and that of his interpreter, Ahmed, and his family: pregnant sister-in-law blown up as she is teaching a class of children, brother-in-law kidnapped and murdered, and another brother kidnapped, the family forced to flee.

As he travels across Iraq with British and US forces, Oliver Poole witnesses firsthand the impact that war has on the troops. Finally, in November 2006, with the Telegraph closing down his office, Oliver Poole joined the masses escaping Iraq through the Baghdad airport.

Fully up-to-date (up to the end of 2007), Red Zone is the most intimate and moving account of the war in Iraq to be published.

Oliver Poole first entered Iraq in March 2003 after crossing the Kuwaiti border as the only British daily newspaper reporter “embedded” with the US Army. His account of the invasion, Black Knights: On the Bloody Road to Baghdad (HarperCollins), sold over thirty thousand copies.