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Authors: Lawrence Anthony

BOOK: Babylon's Ark
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Even at the last minute, Colonel Fikes was reluctant to give the final okay. Playing my trump card, I laid it on thick: “This is not the U.S. border we are talking about. It's the Kuwait border. And the Kuwaiti government has given me permission to cross it into Iraq.”
Fikes resignedly picked up his pen. He had one final piece of advice: “You are the first civilian in. Keep your head down; it's rough in there.”
I finally had my elusive clearance permit. Despite our difficulties, Fikes was a really good man and I could see he only had my own safety in mind. I promised to phone him when I got to Baghdad.
Adrian Oldfield shook my hand when I left. “If you survive this,” he said somewhat ominously, “I will take you up on your offer to visit you at your game reserve one day.”
I nodded. “With pleasure. And bring Jim Fikes with you.”
I hired a car at the airport “for business in Kuwait City,” not daring to reveal my true destination and bought supplies. I wished I had a gun, even a pistol would be better than nothing, but getting a weapon in Kuwait was out of the question. I would have to find one in Baghdad.
That night I phoned Françoise and told her I was going in, I don't think she, sitting alone four thousand miles away and knowing I was about to enter a war zone, shared my enthusiasm.
N
OW THAT I HAD FINALLY ARRIVED in Baghdad, I felt as deflated as a punctured tire.
The trashed complex in front of me was the last thing I had expected. Had I traveled four thousand miles, spent countless hours on the phone with officials from four different countries, and bulldozed my way through red tape just to arrive at this?
One glance at the bomb-blasted rubble in the park around the zoo showed with stark clarity that the mountain of bureaucracy I had faced in crossing the Iraq border was merely a pimple compared to what lay ahead.
Seeing the look on my face, Lt. Brian Szydlik nodded grimly. “Not too good, huh?”
He then quizzed me at length about our journey, and I could tell he was impressed we had made it all the way from Kuwait in a civilian car unscathed. We might be mad or stupid, but at least we were serious.
However, our main attraction as far as he was concerned was
that we were taking a major hassle off his hands. The zoo and its pitiful inhabitants were in his zone of command, and it was a nonmilitary problem he needed like a hole in the head.
“You sure you gonna take charge of these animals?” he asked me again.
I nodded.
“The coalition guys in Kuwait told you to do that?”
I continued nodding and tapped my authorization papers.
He beamed and shook my hand once more. It was the first time since I had arrived in Iraq that I felt really welcome. It seemed that all the banging on bureaucratic doors, from South Africa to Kuwait, to get here could even have been worthwhile after all.
“We'll help all we can, but there's still a war on,” he said.
“Thanks. We're going to need it.”
Brian Szydlik was a professional soldier and damn proud of it. Like all good commanders, he held the safety of his men paramount. He had done what he could to keep the zoo's creatures alive, but in a combat zone this was a distraction he could ill afford in case it endangered the lives of his troops.
As we were speaking, a stocky middle-aged Iraqi man approached us. His hair was ash gray and his face crumpled with exhaustion. But when he smiled you could see humor light up his eyes.
Szydlik waved him over. “This is Husham Hussan, the deputy director of the Baghdad Zoo—or what's left of it.”
Dr. Husham Mohamed Hussan's face was a portrait of slack-jawed disbelief as we shook hands and I explained my mission. He could not believe a foreigner had come all the way from the far end of Africa to help his humble zoo. How the hell had I even known about them?
When I opened the trunk of my rental car and showed him the medicines we had brought from across the border, courtesy of the Kuwait City zoo, he grabbed my hand and wept.
I wasn't quite sure what to say. “Has it been bad, my friend?”
He nodded. “Come. I show.”
This was what my trip had been all about; at last I would have the truth. I would see it for myself. But nothing could have steeled me for what I was about to witness.
The first thing I noticed was the entrance. Well, I couldn't really miss it—the massive, ornate black-and-gold-painted gates, engraved with lions baring their fangs at each other, had been blasted open and now lurched at drunken angles.
But those were merely the portals to Hades. For once I was inside, the true horror hit me.
The animal cages were foul beyond belief; they had not been cleaned for God knows how long. Evaporated, ammonia-reeking urine formed salty white patches on the ground, while piles of excrement, black and putrid, had hardened in the scorching sun. The stench was pungent enough to turn the strongest stomach.
Black swarms of flies, so dense you couldn't see through them, hovered over the gnawed skeletons of the dead animals that had been tossed into the dens to feed the live ones; the bilious-ripe malodor of death and decay clogged the air like a soiled cloud.
The wall of the lions' enclosure had a gaping hole from a direct hit from a mortar shell, which the Americans had crudely plugged with rubble and wire. If the lions were healthy, that wouldn't hold them for five minutes, I thought, making a mental note to seal the break properly as soon as possible.
Inside the enclosure, the giant cats stared at us listlessly, some barely able to lift their heads. I looked carefully; they were African lions. I was expecting the rarer and slightly smaller Asian subspecies,
Panthero leo persica
.
In another cage a rare Bengal tiger feebly bared his fangs, his once magnificently striped pelt as faded as old string. At the back of the adjacent enclosure, camouflaged in the shade, was another younger male Bengal as scrawny and listless as the other one was.
An Iraqi brown bear, which Husham said had apparently killed three looters who broke into his cage, was doing what we conservationists call stereotyping—dementedly moving backward and forward
within his four-walled confines as he went stir-crazy. Another bear lay curled in the corner like a frightened child, distressed beyond belief.
In the adjacent cages a lynx was, like the brown bear, stereotyping. Farther on in a pen some Iraqi boars lay huddled miserably on the only tiny piece of dry land in a flooded, muddied quagmire—courtesy of a wrecked water pipe.
The whole place looked as if a tornado had hit it, then reversed and come back through again for good measure. Rubbish and junk littered the grounds; looters were wandering around unconcernedly helping themselves at their leisure; cages were standing open. The zoo looked and felt like it had been completely overwhelmed. There was an atmosphere of ruined hopelessness, made all the more real for me by the fact that I knew there was no formal rescue team on the way. With the war still going on, no staff, and the city shut down, I realized that there was precious little chance in hell that my presence alone could make any real difference.
Other animals, including baboons and monkeys too nimble for looters to capture, were running free on the grounds. I also caught glimpses of a desert fox, another lynx, and an assortment of dogs whose bodies were scarcely more than fur and ribs. Overhead, parrots, falcons, and other birds that had managed to evade the looters were circling or perched in the eucalyptus trees, squawking noisily.
These were the sole remnants of the zoo's 650 prewar inhabitants. And they had endured only because they had vicious-enough teeth or claws to fight back against the looters. Or wings to fly off.
Dr. Husham, as he was known, said he needed protective clothing to corral most of the animals running wild. I nodded; that would be a priority. But where did one get animal capture gear in a war zone? Perhaps we could borrow some bulletproof vests from soldiers.
We came across a huge bomb crater, too big to climb out if you fell in. Lying near it was a decomposing pony.
“This bomb come before soldiers,” said Husham.
I nodded. It was obviously an off-target hit from the “shock and awe” bombing offensive that presaged the invasion.
Dr. Husham then showed us a brand-new enclosure that had been proudly built for the zoo's newest assets—two beautiful giraffes, the tallest and most awkwardly graceful of all creatures. It was empty, the cast-iron gates ripped off at the hinges by a flood of crazed humanity. By some cruel fate, the animals had arrived from Africa the day the war started. Husham told me they were never even off-loaded.
One giraffe, he had heard, had definitely been killed and eaten. The other was probably in some cramped cage, unable to stand, waiting to be sold on the black market.
Two ostriches went the same way, the looters trussing them up and carting them off to an unspeakable fate.
Even now, in bright daylight, a horde of looters were jostling one another outside the buildings, grabbing whatever had not yet been carried off even if it was worthless. We watched, fists clenched tight. There was nothing we, as unarmed civilians, could do.
I had started to walk across a patch of open ground to the lake when Husham grabbed my arm.
“Bombs,” he said.
I had been so intent on the hellish scenario before me that I hadn't taken in my surroundings, something I do automatically in the bush as a matter of course. I looked around and saw instantly what he meant. Scattered around was unexploded ordnance, the lethal collateral of war.
“Americans take many,” he said, “but some still stay here.”
Only the paved pathways were safe. But that didn't seem to deter the looters who stampeded over the grounds like a cattle herd.
A Bradley tank rumbled slowly into the zoo's entrance, its squat menace giving it an imperious air of invincibility. The looters reluctantly moved off, even though they knew the Americans had not started policing them yet.
Husham then led the way to the artificial lake fed by the Tigris
River. The birdcages on the walkway had been ripped open and, Husham told us, most of the inhabitants eaten as if they were chickens. Amazon macaws, European lovebirds, and African gray parrots had their necks wrung and were put in someone's pot.
The lake itself was foul; pumps that sucked the water up from the river had been stripped and looted. Even the giant turbine that kept the lake circulating was now just junk metal. The water was rancid brown, but to my astonishment, there were several paddleboats out in the middle.
I was about to ask Husham what they were doing when suddenly a flock of waterfowl took off, screeching and flapping as they scrambled for height. I heard a thin, triumphant shout echo in the distance and saw a man being hauled aboard one of the boats. In his hand was a writhing mass of feathers.
“Ali Baba,” said Husham, using the Arabic slang for looters. They would paddle silently toward the birds, then slip into the water and glide up from behind, grabbing their prey.
I almost retched just at the thought of swimming in that fetid water. Yet these people were doing that daily to put food on the table.
I asked Husham in pidgin English and using a variety of hand signs when he had last had a decent meal. He shrugged: “Many days small food, Baghdad no food—very bad.”
He said most of the zoo staff had worked without pay during the buildup to the war. They had only left once the Republican Guard soldiers and fedayeen arrived, ordered them off the premises at gunpoint, and started digging in, preparing for battle. That their chosen battle zone was adjacent to the leading collection of wild animals in the Middle East was irrelevant to them.
The fedayeen had been particularly aggressive, and when he and the zoo's director, Dr. Adel Salman Mousa, argued with the young gunmen, pleading for a little more time to feed and care for the animals, they were told they would be shot if they didn't shut up.
Before they left, Adel, Husham, and the rest of the staff frantically distributed the last of the food and filled the water troughs to
overflowing. They did it silently, depressed beyond words. They believed they would never see their animals again.
About ten days later the American tanks arrived and a pitched battle raged in the park grounds, right where I was standing.
I could picture with brutal clarity the horror the animals must have suffered, bullets ricocheting off their cages, turbine-engine tanks at full roar with their steel tracks ripping up roads, missiles whistling from the sky, and cosmic-clapping bombs shredding buildings. However petrifying it must be for humans, it would be unimaginably worse for animals trapped in cages.
As I thought of this, for some reason I looked at the traumatized old brown bear, lying curled in a fetal position. Husham saw my gaze and told me her name was Saedia. She had been with the zoo for thirty years and was blind.
“At least no see bombs,” said Husham.
Maybe, I thought. But that possibly meant her hearing was more acute—and her unseeing terror horribly multiplied.
Like most Baghdad civilians, Husham had hidden at home during the brief but vicious conventional military struggle for the city. Each morning he would crack open the curtains and scrutinize the city skyline to see if rockets and bombs were still exploding.
One morning he noticed birds flying in the east, roughly above the area where the zoo was. Falcons, gliding gloriously in the gusting thermals. He rubbed his eyes. Desert falcons flying over the middle of the city? And amid all the gunfire and battle flak?
Husham loved falcons more than any other bird. He told us they were symbolic of his country, Iraq, soaring spiritually and physically above these ancient lands.
Then it dawned on him; those were the zoo's falcons. His falcons ! They must have somehow got free. That could only have happened if their cages had been opened.
It was at that moment it hit him. The zoo—his zoo—was being plundered.
He left straightaway, walking the five shrapnel-strewn miles
from his home, trying to skirt both American soldiers and rampant looters. There were hit-and-run firefights erupting constantly throughout the streets, so he decided to keep his head down and walk as fast as he could. Every now and again, amid the whining ricochets, a bullet would “crack” close by and he would instinctively duck. But he was fatalistic: it was up to Allah whether he made it or not.

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