Through the novels The Green Zone and Baghdad Marlboro, Chapter 3 gave us a fuller and more complex picture of the widespread violence and the extent of the abuse Iraqis have suffered in the politics of security enforced by the American occupation and in a sectarian war where people can be raided, arrested, kidnapped and taken to secret locations to be tortured and killed – all at random. In Ibrāhīm's suicide operation in the heart of the Green Zone, we saw how walls no longer protect and how the safe haven of the Green Zone itself is also threatened by the same logic of terror that has replaced the city as a social space, according to Giorgio Agamben's analysis. Agamben finds in this logic that extends terror to all citizens the paradigm or ‘the structuring principle of the camp as the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are still living’. For Agamben, the camp is not only and necessarily, as its name may indicate, a carceral place where people can be interned and abused; it is also a principle that extends terror, abuse and torture to all citizens. In that sense, we can say that in Chapter 3 we saw the spread of the idea of the camp not only to the whole of the vulnerable portions of the Iraqi population in the unprotected zones but also to the Green Zone itself with transgressive acts such as Ibrāhīm's bringing the fate of the killable, the homo sacer, to the very heart of previously deemed safe enclaves.

Where in Chapter 2 we saw a manifestation of the camp in the Killing Box and the extermination of the retreating troops, in this chapter, through the examination and discussion of Shākir Nūrī's novel Majānīn Būkā (The madmen of Camp Bucca), published in 2012, we see another dimension of the war on terror: the camp, not only as a virtual camp or as principle and ‘a hidden matrix’ shaping the political space where Iraqi people live but as a dreadful reality that literally materialises in the Iraqi desert under the American occupation.