WASHINGTON, 28 April 2006 — Three years after a US-led invasion ousted Saddam Hussein’s regime, only one major US building project in Iraq is on schedule and within budget: The massive new American Embassy compound.
The fortress-like compound rising beside the Tigris River will be the largest of its kind in the world — the size of Vatican City, or 80 football fields, or six times larger than the United Nations compound in New York — on about 104 acres. With the population of a small town, it is designed to be entirely self-sufficient; it will have its own defense force and self-contained power and water plants.
The high-tech compound will have 21 buildings reinforced to 2.5 times usual standards. Some walls as said to be 15 feet thick or more. Scheduled for completion by June 2007, the installation is touted as not only the largest, but the most secure diplomatic embassy in the world.
The $592 million facility is being built inside the heavily fortified Green Zone by 900 non-Iraqi foreign workers who are housed nearby and under the supervision of a Kuwaiti contractor, according to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report.
Besides two major diplomatic office buildings, homes for the ambassador and his deputy, and the six apartment buildings for staff, the compound will offer a swimming pool, gym, commissary, food court and American Club, all housed in a recreation building.
Security, overseen by US Marines, will be extraordinary: Setbacks and perimeter no-go areas that will be especially deep, structures reinforced to 2.5-times the standard, and five high-security entrances, plus an emergency entrance-exit, the Senate report says.
Work for the embassy was quietly awarded last summer to a controversial Kuwait-based construction firm, First Kuwaiti General Trading & Contracting (FKTC).
FKTC has been accused of exploiting employees and coercing low-paid laborers to work in Iraq.
Several of the US contractors competing for the Baghdad embassy project said they were amazed at the US State Department’s decision to award the contract to FKTC.
They say that some competing contractors possessed far stronger experience in such work and that at least one award-winning company offered to perform the all but the most classified work for $60 million to $70 million less than FKTC.
Several other contractors believe that a high-level decision at the State Department was made to favor a Kuwait-based firm in appreciation for Kuwait’s support of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
“It was political,” said one contractor.
Meanwhile, news about the new US Embassy remains cloaked in secrecy.
“We can’t talk about it. Security reasons,” Roberta Rossi, a spokeswoman at the current embassy, told journalists who asked for information about the project.
State Department spokesman Justin Higgins defended the size of the embassy, saying it is indicative of the work facing the United States here.
“It’s somewhat self-evident that there’s going to be a fairly sizable commitment to Iraq by the US government in all forms for several years,” he recently told journalists.
The current US Embassy in Iraq has nearly 5,5,000 Americans and Iraqis working there, more than at any other US embassy. Almost half listed as security, are far more numerous than at any other US mission worldwide. They rarely venture out into the “Red Zone,” that is, violence-torn Iraq.
This huge American contingent at the center of power has drawn criticism.
“The presence of a massive US embassy — by far the largest in the world — co-located in the Green Zone with the Iraqi government is seen by Iraqis as an indication of who actually exercises power in their country,” the International Crisis Group, a European-based research group, said in one of its periodic reports on Iraq.
