Mosul
If you want to understand Mosul, there are worse places to start than a trip to the city’s zoo. After two and a half years of Isis occupation, and months of fighting between the militants and government forces, it is one of the few outdoor attractions still standing in Iraq’s second city.
There is, however, very little to recommend it to the traditional zoo-goer. When I visited recently, there were only two animals there: Simba, a rheumatic lion, and Lula, a watery-eyed bear whose two cubs had been lost to hunger. For all its failings as a family attraction, it is an instructive microcosm of a complicated conflict that is far from over.
Months after the east of Mosul, where the zoo lies, was taken by the Iraqi army, fighting to reclaim the west of the city is still ongoing. But liberation has not brought peace. Millions are still displaced, the government is crippled by corruption and internal rivalries and international relief efforts are hampered by red tape.
For Mosul’s inhabitants – human, ursine and leonine – the future looks bleak. Mortars and sniper fire pound the streets around the zoo. Isis drones buzz across the river Tigris – which bisects the city – strapped with grenades. Sleeper cells are activated almost daily; suicide bombers seek martyrdom in the city’s markets and kebab restaurants.
On a spring morning this year, Simba and Lula paced their minuscule cages, covered in mud and excrement. Their skin hung from bare bones. Simba was a recent orphan. His mother’s shallow grave lay in front of his cage. She had, bystanders sheepishly admitted, died after eating Simba’s father’s dead body.
The animals had been kept alive by a group of locals led by Abu Laith, a square-set 50-year-old mechanic. For months, as the fighting grew closer and sent food prices rocketing, they pooled their scraps to keep the animals alive. Their children delved through the rubbish of local restaurants for fish heads and fruit peelings. They survived. But there is little chance of a happy ending.
International relief efforts have proved leaden and inefficient. A rescue mission by a Swiss charity this month almost failed after local officials intervened to stop Simba and Lula being taken from Mosul – detaining the animals at a checkpoint on the city’s outskirts.
It was, they said, the paperwork. But locals, used to the clumpy Mafioso tactics wielded by some of their leaders, rolled their eyes. The animal’s detention was, some said, a power play between officials in the Iraqi government and the Kurdistan Regional Government, where the animals were headed.
Others said it was an attempt by local officials to gain credit for saving the animals after Simba and Lula’s plight was brought to international attention. The stiff-joined lion and conjuntival bear became valuable currency in a geopolitical chess game – internally displaced, like millions of others.
‘The government don’t care about the animal’s condition,’ said Hakam Zarari, a local resident and PhD candidate in physical chemistry. ‘In a symbolic sense, the people of Mosul are like the animals. No one cares about them until someone comes from the outside.’
After nine days of political posturing, they were finally allowed to travel to Erbil. From there, they flew to Jordan to start a new life – leaving behind their home for ever.
Before Isis swept through Mosul in 2014, the zoo was one of the premier attractions in a dangerous city devoid of amusement. During the weekends, families would flock to the park to take selfies with Shetland ponies and shout at the lions in the hope they would roar.
But many of the zoo’s employees, locals claimed, fled with hundreds of thousands of others upon the militant’s arrival, leaving their animals to starve. Those who remained – human and animal alike – felt abandoned.
‘I’m very angry at them, they shouldn’t have escaped,’ seethed Abu Laith, the volunteer zoo warden who, like many men his age, prefers the company of animals to people. Especially when the people in question were Isis fighters. ‘Isis didn’t like animals,’ he said. ‘These animals are better than them. They are less than animals.’
During daily visits to the zoo he would fume silently as the militants rattled the bars of the cages with sticks, trying to attract attention from the starving animals. His anger echoed the frustrations of many locals with the militants, who they considered brutal, violent bullies whose cruelty was matched only by their idiocy. ‘They were so rude,’ he said, gently scratching Simba’s head with a stick. ‘These animals are kind. They don’t deserve this.’
When the fighting to retake the city began in autumn last year, food supplies began to run low. Laith’s four-year-old son, Ashraf, saved his pocket money to buy food for the starving monkeys. After weeks of scrimping, he had enough to give them a packet of crisps. But his generosity wasn’t rewarded: the starving animals bit his hand as he fed them through the bars of their cage.
Months later, red with humiliation, he showed me a glowing pink scar near his left thumb. ‘My son was trying to be kind but it didn’t work,’ boomed his father, eyes shining as mortar fire sounded in the distance. ‘That’s a lesson. It’s a lesson many learnt under Isis.’
Weeks later, the monkeys escaped. Abu Laith scrambled the neighbourhood to a hunt, where residents spent their nights climbing trees hoping to catch the sleeping creatures. ‘We would sleep in the day and wait until the night,’ one of the local children said. ‘Then we’d creep up very slowly and grab them.’
By the time they had caught the monkeys, the fighting was lapping at the edges of the city. With the help of his family, Abu Laith loaded the less dangerous animals onto the back of his pickup truck. The ponies, rabbits and birds of paradise crowded together on the bumpy road from the zoo to a local farm.
But Simba and Lula had to stay – trapped like other Mosulawis in the besieged city. ‘We never thought about eating them,’ shouted Abu Laith at no-one in particular. ‘Even when we were really hungry. I am the father of lions. I will not let them die. Mosul zoo will survive.’ Now, like many others, Simba and Lula have left Mosul, but their fate remains uncertain.
Louise Callaghan is Turkey correspondent for the Sunday Times
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