The ‘security’ wall recently proposed by the Iraqi government, and stretching more than 300 kilometers around the city of Baghdad is another mechanism of power that furthers the fragmentation of the territory and national polity, through the separation and segregation of communities. This process was generated by and during imperial occupations and invasions, the most recent being the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. In recent years, resulting from US policies in Iraq, the urban public space of Baghdad has been reconfigured. The erection of walls and checkpoints, have to a great extent separated and confined the inhabitants within sectarian and ethnic enclaves. These processes that destroyed older neighbourhoods and streets have been concurrently erasing and marginalizing older memories of a more diverse city, where spatial arrangements had enabled different kinds of social relationships. Since memory and place are inextricably linked, the reconstitution of space diminished national consciousness and instead fostered collective solidarities based on ethnic or sectarian belongings. Thus, this paper aims to argue that these physical structures and check points refract an imperial imaginary and strategy of the 'new' Iraq, and parallel other processes, such as census taking, and formal institutionalization of sectarian and ethnic identities that undermine national belonging and citizenship. These processes have repercussions on memory making in the post-2003 neighbourhoods of Baghdad and in Iraq more generally. Controlling the movement of Iraqis for example, the condition that internally displaced groups from outside must have a sponsor from Baghdad in order to enter the city, and other kinds of obstructions of movement within and between their cities, contribute to new social and political relationships, and new forms of belonging, and memory making. Needless to say, identities are processes, always in flux and in a state of perpetual contestation in both time and space (Hall 2006), and informed by social and political contexts. City walls and checkpoints represent “miniature” borders (Stewart 1984). In time, these miniature borders, along with other policies that fragment territory and people confine relationships and experiences, and in turn undermine national belonging creating new layers of otherness. This paper will also situate these physical structures of confinement and control within the context of the crisis of internal displacement in Iraq since the occupation, analyzing how walls and checkpoints have further alienated Iraqis beyond Baghdad from their capital (but also Baghdadis from their larger Iraq), and thus weakening collective national consciousness.