Saddam Hussein’s underground bunker, surprisingly undamaged despite heavy US bombing in 2003, has become a tourist attraction for visitors and residents of Baghdad’s downtown green zone area.US forces hurled two 900 kg GBU-28 bunker-busting bombs at the building on the first night of the US-led offensive on Iraq on March 19, 2003. Over the next four days at least six more bunker-busters were dropped on the building and the holes they smashed in the roof are still visible. However, the bunker itself is virtually intact—more than 20 years after it was built for $66 million by the German firm Boswau and Knauer.Karl Bernd Esser, the bunker architect, told Germany’s ZDF television when the war began that the structure he designed could survive anything short of a direct hit from a Hiroshima-style nuclear weapon.Saddam’s room is about the size of a small master bedroom in a suburban house and differs from the other rooms only by its tan wallpaper.
