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.

Personal eye-witness account of the war in Iraq and the move towards civil war.

Publishers Weekly

Starred Review.

At the beginning of the Iraq war, Daily Telegraph journalist Poole was the only Brit embedded with U.S. troops, accompanying them on their three week mission into Baghdad (chronicled in his 2003 title Black Knights). Haunted, Poole returned to Iraq in 2004 and stayed through 2007, after most journalists had already decamped. The new situation he faces is, in his words, "really bad," a population of 7 million "reduced to barbarism." It doesn't take long for the violence to make a personal impact; while Poole's new editor in London demands positive spin, the brother-in-law of Poole's friend and translator is kidnapped, never to be seen again. The differences a few years make are incredible: camping with troops pre-invasion, Poole was upbeat, happy with his "massive story"; by the time he left the "iconic reporter's hotel" Hamra, once a hub of activity, food, camaraderie and entertainment, it was the bombed-out center of a Baghdad "war cemetery." Poole is a fascinating narrator, chronicling his own disillusionment alongside the stories of his Iraqi friends and the deteriorating state of the nation. Hard to put down, this hard-hitting but deeply compassionate memoir showcases an expert reporter pushing his skill and humanity to their limits. 8 color plates and maps.
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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 30,000 copies. Oliver Poole is currently working as a head hunter in the oil and gas industry.