The challenging part of the lesson starts at the first green checkpoint, which is the third checkpoint overall.
"I was knocked out, and then I found myself in the hospital," said Abbas Asi Belal, 55, a laborer who was renovating a house near the Green Zone checkpoint and sustained a head wound.
Instead, a "green line" of checkpoints manned by international troops is to be introduced, and the 11,000 French and UN peacekeepers now in Côte d'Ivoire are to be gradually withdrawn.
Security maps of southern, eastern and much of northern Afghanistan are coloured livid red, to denote areas of Taliban control, with seams of green showing highways and checkpoints held by the government.
I say "Buenas dias" to the Peruvian contractors who man the checkpoints in the Green Zone and "Salaam Aleikum" to the woman who searches me for hidden weapons.
So did most everyone along the street — from the traffic snarled by checkpoints along the Green Zone's entrances to the demands for badges, or badjat, to enter streets inside that are wide enough for a military parade.
WASHINGTON — The helicopter was hovering over a Baghdad checkpoint into the Green Zone, one typically crowded with cars, Iraqi civilians and United States military personnel.
They include, he wrote, a "sudden coolness" to American advisers and the "forcible takeover" of a checkpoint in the Green Zone.
Although security has improved significantly here over the last number of years, Iraq is still racked by violence, as two suicide car bombers demonstrated on Monday at a checkpoint near the Green Zone, the city's fortified neighborhood for government buildings and embassies.
Blackwater Worldwide, acting as an agent of the United States, deployed CS in the Iraq War from a helicopter hovering over a checkpoint in the Green Zone in Baghdad.
