(Newsweek) Meet the new Baghdad: A thousand mini Green Zones

http://www.newsweek.com/id/70990/page/2

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This, however, is the new normal. Baghdad's safest neighborhoods are those with blast walls around them. A thousand mini Green Zones have bloomed on the urban landscape, tormented fortifications of steel, concrete and barbed wire. Once wide boulevards are subdivided to channel traffic into search lanes, and divided again by barriers to slow suicide bombers. Both Shiites and Sunnis still take long, circuitous routes to work to avoid each other's neighborhoods. Salih al-Moussawi is a young Shiite doctor from Yarmouk, which became an all-Sunni area after five Shiite greengrocers were set afire and burned to death in public last April. He fled the area then, and avoided it until recent weeks. "Now Yarmouk no longer terrifies me," Moussawi says—he goes shopping there. But he's not ready to move home.