March 11, 2008 | By Stephen Farrell

GOPALA, Iraq — Just northeast of Kirkuk is a factory doing some of the best business in Iraq, but whose workers would be content to see it close down.

It lies between Kirkuk and Sulaimaniya on the safer, Kurdish, side of the checkpoint marking the boundary between the semiautonomous Kurdistan Regional Government and the rest of Iraq.

Glimpsed through trees from the highway, the storage yard at first seems to be a do-it-yourself medieval fortress: scores of watchtowers, blast walls, sentry posts and barriers are stacked up in a field ready for delivery to whichever home, compound or neighborhood is next to be sealed off from the outside world.

Gray, featureless and crudely built, these blast walls have become the most readily identifiable symbol of the current state of Iraq, replacing the endless lines of cheap, mustard-colored walls emblazoned with eight-point stars that used to surround Saddam Hussein’s military-industrial nerve centers.

Getting them to their destinations is not always easy. One delivery driver, who refused to be named because he feared being killed, said: “We put our lives in danger. We are risking death to make a living. Twice I have faced gunmen who opened fire on me in Tikrit, but God saved me.”

As workers covered in gray powder scrambled atop cranes and molding cages, Younis Abdul Mohsin, the engineer and manager of the privately owned plant, said it produced 50 tons of concrete a day.
Most of it helps fill United States military contracts in Kirkuk and farther afield.

The largest blast walls, more than 18 feet high and weighing more than two tons, take a whole day to manufacture. Less time-consuming are knee-high roadside barriers that weigh 471 pounds and are used at checkpoints and on approach roads to major installations.
“We are still working on old contracts with the multinational forces which will end after four months, but I think they will be renewed,” Mr. Mohsin said last month.

“The security improvement doesn’t affect too much the rate of production of blast walls. The American Army needs them and buys them nonstop to protect their military bases in Iraq.”

He added: “Of course I want the situation to get better. I am an engineer, I don’t want to make blast walls. I want to build things. We all want the situation to be better, and for this factory to close.”