BAGHDAD, 8 December 2003 — As the sun sets over Baghdad, the call to prayer uncoils from the city’s minarets. A young American soldier is manning a checkpoint. He puts a megaphone to his lips and imitates the sound.

This soldier does not appear to mean harm. His performance is intended to amuse. He clearly has no idea of how offensive his actions are to the millions of Muslims who live on the other side of the razor wire and concrete blocks and sand bags that separate him from them. Another soldier, evidently more senior, tells him to “knock it off” — not for the first time, says the cheerful joker with the bullhorn.

We’re entering the Green Zone, the fortress town of four square miles in which several thousand diplomats, civil servants, consultants, spies, soldiers and contractors live in the heart of Baghdad. The comic-in-khaki is on guard duty.

To ordinary Iraqis this is a parallel universe, a place that is as remote from their own reality — from the frightening house searches by sudden squads of troops and the tedious power cuts — as Michael Jackson’s Neverland.

For them this always was a world apart, or at least much of it was. The site includes Saddam Hussein’s presidential palace, the lavish complex whose marbled halls are now occupied by Iraq’s new rulers, the Coalition Provisional Authority. The ex-dictator’s lothario son, Uday, had a palace here, a multi-turreted fantasy play-den. The compound was off-limits before; now it is even more so.

In the city outside, the streets are jammed with traffic, not least because the zone has been enlarged and cuts off several key thoroughfares. Huge queues of cars line up for petrol, which, in this oil-rich country, remains in frustratingly short supply. Yet the zone’s roads are wide and empty, but for the occasional Land Cruiser or Humvee or for joggers — foreigners taking exercise in the only public place in Baghdad where it is safe to do so.

In the edgy streets outside, there are traffic signs, erected by the US military, banning motorists from parking and warning that “violators will be subject to deadly force”. Inside, rather calmer notices announce the 35mph speed limit. This place was created as a safe haven to allow the occupation authorities and those assisting them in the reconstruction of Iraq to live and work at less risk of attack than within the rest of Baghdad.

True, rockets and mortars sometimes land in the grounds, as Jack Straw, the UK foreign secretary, found out during a recent visit.

But there has been nothing to compare with the suicide bombing against the UN or the rocket attacks on the Al-Rasheed Hotel while Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defense secretary, was staying there or the crude donkey-drawn carts of missiles fired at the Palestine and Sheraton hotels last month.

When the occupation began, some British officials were unhappy that the American military insisted that “coalition” officials locked themselves away for weeks after the fall of Baghdad, only ever venturing out with a heavily armed security detail. Repeated guerrilla attacks have caused this debate to subside.

However, foreign journalists, who roam the country every day and live in houses and hotels outside, continue to be critical of what is known as “Green Zone Syndrome” — the shuttered mindset of the cooped-up officials.

This is hardly surprising, given the extraordinary treatment that correspondents receive as they enter the Zone’s Convention Center, home of the Coalition Press Information Center (CPIC), and the forum for many of the US military’s press conferences. Journalists attending a recent appearance by the US top commander in Iraq, Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, were body-searched four times, and bawled at by soldiers. Good manners are not a strong point in the zone, let alone winning hearts and minds.

New arrivals from the press to CPIC — they love acronyms in the zone — are handed a note: “NO means NO!” it says. “After we say NO a second time to the same question the conversation will be considered over.” For those living inside, getting out is even harder than it is for outsiders to get in.