BAGHDAD - The fortress-like compound rising beside the Tigris River will be the largest of its kind in the world, the size of Vatican City, with the population of a small town, its own defense force, self-contained power and water, and a precarious perch at the heart of Iraq's turbulent future.
The new U.S. Embassy also seems as cloaked in secrecy as the ministate in Rome.
"We can't talk about it. Security reasons," Roberta Rossi, a spokeswoman at the current embassy, said when asked for information about the project.
A British tabloid even told readers the location was being kept secret - news that would surprise Baghdadis who for months have watched the forest of construction cranes at work across the winding Tigris, at the very center of their city and within easy mortar range of anti-U.S. forces in the capital, though fewer explode there these days.
The embassy complex - 21 buildings on 104 acres, according to a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee report - is taking shape on riverside parkland in the fortified "Green Zone," just east of al-Samoud, a former palace of Saddam Hussein's, and across the road from the building where the former president is now on trial.
The Republican Palace, where U.S. Embassy functions are temporarily housed, is less than a mile away in the 4-square-mile zone, an enclave of American and Iraqi government offices and lodgings ringed by miles of concrete barriers.
The 5,500 Americans and Iraqis working at the embassy, almost half listed as security, rarely venture out into the "Red Zone," that is, violence-torn Iraq.
State Department spokesman Justin Higgins defended the size of the embassy, old and new.
"It's somewhat self-evident that there's going to be a fairly sizable commitment to Iraq by the U.S. government in all forms for several years," he said in Washington.
Staff sleep in hundreds of trailers or "containerized" quarters scattered around the Green Zone. Next year, embassy staff will move into six apartment buildings in the new complex, which has been under construction since mid-2005 with a target completion date of June 2007.
"Embassy Baghdad" will dwarf new U.S. embassies elsewhere, projects that typically cover 10 acres.
Original estimates topped $1 billion, but Congress appropriated only $592 million last year. Most has gone to a Kuwait builder, First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting, with the rest awarded to six contractors working on the "classified" portion - the actual offices.
The designs aren't publicly available, but the Senate report makes clear it will be a self-sufficient and "hardened" domain.
It will have its own water wells, electricity plant and wastewaster-treatment facility, "systems to allow 100 percent independence from city utilities," says the report.
Besides two office buildings, homes for the ambassador and his deputy, and the apartment buildings for staff, the compound will offer a swimming pool, gym, commissary, food court and American Club, all in a recreation building.
Security, overseen by U.S. Marines, will be extraordinary: setbacks and perimeter no-go areas that will be especially deep, structures reinforced to 2? times the standard, five high-security entrances, plus an emergency entrance-exit.
Higgins said the work, under way on all parts of the project, is more than one-third complete.
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