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Authors: Lawrence Anthony

BOOK: Babylon's Ark
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Black Hawk helicopters were
thud-thudding
overhead so low that he could clearly see heavily armed men with wraparound dark glasses staring at him. The gleaming ebony choppers exuded a menace so intense it was almost hypnotic—like a cobra mesmerizing a rat. He dared not look up for long, and hoped those cold-faced men could tell he was a civilian, a man who loved animals, not war.
It took over an hour to reach the zoo. When he arrived, Husham could scarcely believe the destruction. The first thing he noticed was that the locks on every cage had been battered off and the doors ripped open.
Even equipment such as basic gardening tools and the animals' water bowls had been stolen. The glass-walled aquarium had been shattered, and a few exotic fish were lying stiff in the desert sun. Somehow they must have been missed in the mad scramble of the looting.
He counted the remaining animals. There were perhaps thirty in all, those that were too dangerous or spiky or quick even for pillagers—apart from the badger that, traumatized beyond comprehension, had survived by burying itself into the iron-hard ground. Looters had even tried to get into the lions' den, widening the hole by clearing the rubble from the bomb blast. No doubt they had fled when confronted by a pride of starving giant cats.
Some soldiers came up to him and aggressively asked what he was doing. They had a war to fight, and although the order was not to harm civilians under anything but suicide bomber circumstances, they were getting fed up with the anarchy. In broken English
he told them he was deputy director of the Baghdad Zoo, and they took him to their commander, Brian Szydlik.
Szydlik was delighted to see Husham; he desperately needed someone to assist with the zoo so he could concentrate on fighting the war. He told Husham the lions had escaped when the mortar hit their enclosure and had been roaming wild in the park after the battle. Szydlik and his men had taken time off from fighting and used armored troop carriers to round the cats up. However, they had been forced to kill three that refused to go back into their cages. One had been shot just outside the tiger 's cage, and Husham sighed with sadness. That would be the lioness they had housed with the Bengal tiger in a mating experiment, and the two animals of different species had formed an unusually close bond. She had, in fact, only been trying to get back to her mate.
Seeing Husham's deep distress at the destruction, Syzdlik said the city had gone mad and it was impossible to keep the looters out without actually shooting some as an example. And that they couldn't do.
Szydlik also said some soldiers had fed the lions a pony and a wolf that had been killed during the battle. And when the starving cats had gobbled that up, the soldiers shot a terminally ill gazelle that they tossed whole into the enclosure.
The biggest problem was water. In between patrols, clearing out pockets of Saddam loyalists, and dodging the daily barrage of sniper bullets, the soldiers had ferried a few bucketfuls into the cages. But that was a time-consuming job and Szydlik, repeating the words like a mantra, had a war to fight.
Husham walked about in a melancholic daze. He couldn't believe his people were doing this. He understood the hunger: he, too, had lived through the terrible sanctions. But this was pure thuggery. Why destroy the locks or rip up the cages? Why steal the fridges and fans? Why pull out the basins and toilets?
He shook his head and forced himself to focus. There was much work to be done.
Among the predatory crowds of men prowling the area, he spotted two zoo staff members who came running up when they saw their boss. They were ready to get back to work, even though they knew there was no chance of being paid.
The first priority was water. Dr. Husham was a practical man, a veterinarian but also a superb do-it-yourself improviser. If something broke, he could fix it with just string and chewing gum. But even he looked at the trashed pumps and pipes with dismay. Without parts, there was nothing he could do—and where do you find parts for pumps in a war zone?
He and his two-man staff gathered some pieces of piping strewn around the battleground and, with a bucket a soldier had given him, jury-rigged a rudimentary viaduct system by the lions' cage. One of his men ferried water, a bucket at a time, from the stagnant canal, and they dribbled the precious liquid into the drinking troughs through the pipes.
The lions, crazed with thirst, smelled the water and loped into the cage from the outside enclosure. They had barely had a lick for almost two weeks; even when they escaped, they had been herded back into their cages before they could reach the canals.
Husham described how the stricken lions tried to drink. Their desiccated tongues were too cracked and swollen to lap, so they buried their faces, openmouthed, in the precious liquid. Only when their parched palates had softened a little could they swallow.
Then they drank and drank and drank.
Next the zookeepers watered the two tigers, then the bears, then the rest. Even the badger came out of his burrow, his thirst conquering his terror. Each bucket was lugged up by hand. It was backbreaking work in heat that soared to one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. But they used what they had; muscle, courage, and a bucket.
And that day, that long, hot, awful April day, was all that kept the few remaining animals of Baghdad Zoo alive.
The next morning the three Iraqis started the survival process again. They had all walked an hour or so from their homes through
the chaotic city, instinctively ducking gunfire and evading threats from looters. Husham wondered how long they could keep it up; there were not enough hours in a day to water animals that weighed up to seven hundred pounds with just one old bucket.
The Iraqis also managed to scrounge some slabs of rancid beef from a pavement dealer, paying with the few dinars they had between them. The men carried the bloody segments from downtown to the zoo, three miles away, on their backs. This meat was shared among the emaciated carnivores, who gobbled it up with famished ferocity.
The emotional Iraqi showed us the pipe system he had erected—the animals' sole lifeline. His justifiable pride was endearing, and I whistled with absolute respect.
“You've done an excellent job, my friend,” I said, looking at the emaciated but still surviving animals. “Well done.”
The Iraqi nodded grimly. “Good you are here.” The words were said with raw emotion.
We paused for a while and I looked around silently, aghast at the devastation. The task ahead defied description.
I did not tell Husham, but I was at first so dismayed that I considered getting a rifle and shooting each animal on the spot. Under the circumstances, some would say it would be the most humane thing to do. Sickened to the pit of my stomach, I reckoned there was more honor and dignity in death for these once-proud creatures than in this degradation.
I had never seen animals in such appalling conditions. What chance did they have of surviving the next two weeks, never mind the war, with what little we had? And even if by some miracle they did make it, what sort of quality of life could they look forward to afterward?
This was no mere musing. I had come expecting it to be bad, but not for a moment had I considered that the animals would be past redemption, that I would travel so far only to find that I had no choice but to put them down.
Nothing, but nothing, could have braced me for this horror show.
Then the anger set in. This was a crime of cosmic proportions, an abuse of such magnitude against our fellow creatures that it beggared belief. It certainly altered my perception of my own species.
What galled even more was that with pitifully few exceptions—men of integrity such as Husham and Szydlik—no one in Baghdad at the time seemed to give a damn. Sure, everyone said we needed to do something. But those were just words.
The reality was starkly different: a handful of us armed with a leaky pipe and a rusty bucket was all that stood between life and death for some of the planet's most magnificent creatures.
Gradually the fog of depression lifted. I now knew why I had come to Baghdad. I knew an iron example had to be set. As I had instinctively grasped while watching my elephants at Thula Thula barely two weeks ago, some of us had to band together, draw a line in the sand, and say, “This far and no further.”
Baghdad was where that line could be drawn. I had to stay; the animals had to survive.
But where to start?
I wasn't exactly sure. But I decided we would have to confront each problem one at a time, like a game of pickup sticks, or else we would be engulfed by the enormity of it all. We needed ripples of little victories to keep morale up, or else we would flounder.
I sensed Dr. Husham and his two helpers were sizing me up, wondering what to make of me. There was no doubt they considered me to be in charge. For a start, I was the only one who could talk to the Americans. I had brought in the supplies. I had some money.
This was a foreign crisis to them—they needed a foreigner to help get them out of it.
Okay, I said, as confidently as I could, our first task was to feed and water the animals with whatever we could. We would do that now.
I then ushered Husham into the hired car with me, and Lieutenant Szydlik provided an escort to an army base near Uday Hussein's palace where meat brought in by a previous convoy had been stored. As much as possible had been kept fresh in two small deep
freezes operating off a generator, but the rest had gone bad in the heat. It would have to suffice. There was nothing else.
The rancid meat, buffalo chunks imported from India, was tossed to the famished carnivores and disappeared into a black hole of snapping fangs and claws. Moldy cabbages and vegetables were tossed into the bear cages, to be equally ferociously consumed.
The next step was water. This was critical. Dr. Husham had done amazing work keeping at least a trickle in the cages, but it was not enough to keep large creatures such as lions and bears going for much longer. All the animals were rapidly dehydrating in the intense heat and real summer hadn't even begun. I made a mental note to scrounge some more buckets from … well, God knows where; looters had stolen all equipment belonging to the zoo.
I then asked when the zoo staff had last been paid. “Almost two months ago,” replied Dr. Husham. His helpers nodded.
“Get the word out that anyone coming back to work will get money,” I said. “American dollars—cash,” I added for emphasis.
The Iraqi promised to do just that. For what I needed more than anything was strong hands to lug water up from the canals surrounding the zoo with whatever receptacles we could find. It would be backbreaking work in the scorching heat. But that's what had to be done.
I also needed men to muck out the filth-curdled cages and dump the festering flyblown carcasses in a bonfire. Restoring basic hygiene was our third priority after food and water.
“Tomorrow the work starts,” I told Husham. The vet nodded. I patted his shoulder; the Iraqi had shown he had grit by the barrelful.
“If it is safe, we will be here,” he assured me. “Also Dr. Adel, the zoo director, has come back. I will find him. He will help.”
The Kuwaitis and I had planned to bed down for the night in the zoo's three-roomed administration headquarters, but Lieutenant Szydlik vetoed that outright. It was too dangerous: firefights were still flaring throughout Baghdad, and the ferocity of looting intensified exponentially after dark. The city by day was scary; by night it was terrifying.
He told us to follow him as he drove across the park to the Al-Rashid Hotel, which had been commandeered by the Third Infantry Division as their headquarters after the main battle for the city was over. That's where we would be quartered, the only relatively safe place in Iraq.
It was a journey of just a mile or so, but there were so many twisted and jagged cartridges cluttering the road I was convinced we would pop all four of the hired car's tires.
We stuck as close to Szydlik as we dared; any civilian vehicle or unauthorized person in the vicinity was shot on the spot. Buzzing helicopters in the sky maintained ceaseless aerial surveillance. It was comforting to have those sinister-looking Black Hawks hovering above—if they were on your side, that is.
A few minutes later we were at the Al-Rashid.
T
HE FOURTEEN-STORY AL-RASHID HOTEL, a rectangular dust brown colossus, towered on the Baghdad skyline like a giant concrete crate. Styled in what is architecturally known as Modern Mesopotamian and built as a showpiece high-rise, it once boasted five stars and was the hub of the city's jet set.
Not anymore. No longer was this some luxury resort with ranks of Mercedes-Benzes and Rolls-Royce parked outside. Instead Abrams tanks and Bradley armored fighting vehicles circled the building in a stifling metallic embrace while their crews in dirty combat gear sweated in the desert sun. Their faces were taut with vigilance and they watched every flicker on the streets through shaded, squinting eyes.
Inside the hotel parking lot and front garden, more tanks squatted on every square inch of space. Scores of Humvee scout cars, which supported the tanks by “painting” targets with lasers, were squeezed in wherever room could be found—some even on the entrance stairway.
The Third ID, the crack unit that had taken Baghdad, had moved in and you knew it.
My hired car couldn't be more out of place among these ugly-beautiful machines, and as we parked up against the hotel lobby entrance, the tank crews stared at us with utter disbelief.
In time this was to become the center of the Green Zone, the most tightly guarded area in Iraq, but at the moment it was where frontline warriors took respite between patrols and firefights. Though it was designated as home base, everyone was on edge.
No attempt had been made to clean up the debris of recent battle. There just hadn't been time. Spent cartridges covered the ground outside the main entrance, and the surface of the turning circle was shredded into tarred gunk by tank treads.
The hotel's walls had been purposefully built to withstand Rocket-Propelled Grenade (RPG) attacks but were pitted from bullet and mortar fire received during the battle to take the building, as were the courtyard pavements.
Lamp poles were bent like snapped toothpicks, while at the gates the bullet-chipped statue of Harun al-Rashid, the legendary caliph of Baghdad known worldwide from the
Arabian Nights
tales, hunched forlornly.
On the pavement, a few meters away from the entrance, the putrid remains of a dead Iraqi fighter lay rotting in the heat. Wherever you turned, the burnt-metallic smell of battle, coppery and caustic, fiercely assaulted your senses.
When American soldiers stormed the hotel they were given a bizarre reminder of how personal this blitzkrieg war against Saddam was. For there, greeting them in the entrance to the marbled lobby, was a cartoon caricature of George H.W. Bush in mosaic on the floor with a “Bush is Criminal” caption inscribed in English and Arabic beneath it. It was so large it dominated the entrance portal. Indeed, it was impossible to walk into the hotel without using the elder Bush's face as a doormat. This was intentional; it was Saddam's “revenge” for the First Gulf War, when the elder Bush had
been president. The irony of the younger Bush completing the job was not lost on those at the front lines.
But the elder Bush's parodied portrait was not what I first noticed as I followed Lieutenant Szydlik inside. It was the yeasty-ripe aroma of scores of unwashed men, so pungent it was an almost palpable fog. Khaki-camouflaged soldiers on canvas cots or open-zipped sleeping bags lay around the high-roofed reception area like sacks of dirty laundry, while in the lounge opposite battle-bleary GIs just off patrol and too fatigued to swat the squadrons of whining mosquitoes lay collapsed wherever they could find the space.
Others were sitting around in small groups, either chatting quietly or just crumpled with damp exhaustion, still wearing heavy body armor after a day of skirmishes in the soul-sapping sun.
These were the troops who had taken Baghdad, fighting men from the Third ID. They were among the elite, tough combatants who had spearheaded the strike across the desert, advancing more than six hundred miles in twenty days and obliterating all resistance with almost casual ease. Despite the scene of random chaos here in the hotel, one terse order would have them up and ready for action in an instant.
There had been no opportunity to organize “slop squads” and thus litter was jettisoned everywhere; thousands of discarded Meals Ready to Eat (MRE) ration boxes were scattered on a carpet of concertinaed cigarette butts and glass shards. The massive French windows that lined the huge reception hall and lounge area had all been smashed in, while above us wires hung like blackened noodles from the ceiling. Toilets at the stairwell overflowed in foul ammoniac rivers, and a steel vault door that hadn't opened to a hefty shove had been dynamited and dangled groggily on its torn hinges. All the safe-deposit boxes behind the reception area had been savagely levered open.
Outside the shattered windows, behind a trampled garden and tennis court, was an Olympic-size swimming pool, empty except
for a foot or so of soupy green water. Overturned suntanning beds and an empty gym added to the scene of forsaken splendor.
There was no running water anywhere in the city, so when the soldiers commandeered the hotel they knew each toilet in each room on all fourteen floors had one final flush in it. For soldiers who had been cooped up in a tank for three solid weeks, a proper toilet was an unimaginable luxury. Like a rising tide, the bowls filled, and those who still needed to go would move on to the next floor, and so on, up until they reached the top level. Nobody's sure which soldier got the last toilet on the top floor, but it must have been a sprint. When the breeze blew across the desert from the west, you didn't want to be standing in the lee of the Al-Rashid.
Before the invasions, the 379-room hotel had been the buzzing hub of Baghdad and Saddam himself regularly used it as a pleasure dome for entertaining foreign dignitaries. It was also where his sons picked up girls who dared not say no—a decadent oasis where alcohol gushed in an austerely dry Muslim city. At night men and women clad in designer clothes gyrated in the discos to hip-thrusting pop music, light-years removed from the djellabas, burkas, and kaffiyehs on the streets. At least three a-la-carte restaurants catered to those with bulging wallets.
It also was where Iraq's abhorrent secret police, the Mukhabarat, hung out. They were so obvious in their cheap suits and bushy Saddam-aping mustaches that their businessmen disguises were a joke. There was, however, nothing funny about their brutal interrogation procedures and the human shredding machines that were said to be their preferred method of disposing of bodies. Apparently they routinely bugged the hotel's rooms, and stories were told of legions of guests who, having just decided what to order from room service, suddenly found a waiter at their door. He knew their orders before they had called, courtesy of the bumbling Inspector Clouseaus listening to the hidden microphones.
Indeed, Saddam's security paranoia was microcosmed at the Al-Rashid. Each floor had had a round-the-clock concierge sitting at a
desk by the elevators to report the comings and goings of every guest to the secret police.
The hotel became internationally famous, albeit probably not in the way its management would have chosen, in the First Gulf War after Peter Arnett's CNN team filmed from its roof the nightly pyrotechnics of Baghdad's administration infrastructure being bombed at will.
This time around, as the war approached, the Al-Rashid was known to be a potential military target and so most journalists booked into the less ostentatious Palestine Hotel on the other side of the river.
However, if the coalition forces regarded an extravagantly opulent hotel as a prime target in their hunt for Saddam, they had good reason. For the Al-Rashid was no mere civilian establishment; it had been specifically designed to be one of the dictator 's numerous bunkers around the city, and its thickly reinforced concrete walls were built to withstand rocket attacks. Saddam's final preinvasion propaganda clip of him discussing military tactics with his cabinet was filmed in one of a series of heavily fortified underground chambers that honeycombed the foundation. Lengthy underground tunnels provided a whole host of escape routes.
As we surveyed the devastated lobby, another soldier walked up and Lieutenant Szydlik introduced us to him: Lieutenant Case. They had been at the West Point Military Academy together, and Case was happy to take his friend's word that we were worth looking after.
Officers had taken the bottom floors and after that rooms were grabbed by the crews on a first come, first served basis. The only available accommodations now were on the seventh floor or higher, and we were directed to the staircase.
When we finally reached the seventh floor, chests heaving after the climb, there was a handwritten sign in the foyer near the elevators that was not exactly hospitable: THIS IS DOD PHOTOGRAPHERS' AREA. KEEP OUT.
I assumed, correctly, that DOD stood for Department of Defense. But I had been told by the officer in charge to find a room on the seventh floor and I intended to do just that.
There were no keys and I started testing doors to see which rooms were vacant. This was easy, as all locked doors had been smashed open—courtesy of a sledgehammer conveniently placed against the corridor wall.
Suddenly a voice boomed from behind, “Who the fuck are you?”
It was said with a smile that robbed the obscenity of belligerence. And to my utter astonishment, the accent was South African.
I turned around to see an unshaven, wiry man with a cigarette curling smoke from his bottom lip. He was obviously one of the photographers. Maybe even the guy who had put up the KEEP OUT sign.
“Howzit,” I said, giving the colloquial South African greeting. “I'm Lawrence Anthony.”
The man looked at me suspiciously, equally astounded to hear an idiom from his homeland. “What the hell are you doing here?” he asked in jovial amazement.
“I'm a conservationist. Come to help out at the zoo.”
“The zoo? The one down the road?”
“Ja. It's in a complete mess. They fought a battle right through it. Shot the shit out of the place.”
The man laughed as if this were the funniest thing in the world, his chest heaving with crazy mirth. “Everything's a fucking zoo here, man.”
I laughed self-consciously with him.
Eventually he put out his hand, stilling chuckling. “Alistair McLarty. Where're you from back home?”
I shook the proffered hand. “Zululand. And you?”
“Jo'burg. Shit, didn't think I'd find another compatriot in this hellhole.”
I waved a hand down the corridor. “Which room do you recommend?”
Alistair paused for a moment. “This floor 's no good. You'll want to go higher.”
He then looked at me for a long moment. He was sizing me up; should the DOD photogs allow me on their floor? In a situation where resources were minimal, you jealously guarded what meager assets you had. This was their floor. They were there first on it, and they decided who stayed there. Or not.
“What do you do back home?” he asked.
“I have a game reserve,” I replied. “Thula Thula.”
“I've heard of it. That's where they handle problem elephants. Is that you?”
“That's me.”
Most South Africans have empathy with wild animals. It's part of the national bushveld psyche.
He stroked his chin, as if wrestling with a dilemma. “Well, okay. Let's see what there is here.”
We forced our way into the first room, shoving the sledgehammer-shattered door aside.
“The first thing is to check out the toilet,” said Alistair.
He gingerly opened the bathroom door and then slammed it shut with force.
“Whoa! You don't want to go in there!” He shuddered, his face wrinkling with revulsion.
We tried a few more, and Alistair eventually declared that under the circumstances Room 720 wasn't too bad—which meant the toilet wasn't more vile than absolutely necessary. I took that room and the Kuwaitis took the room next door.
Exhausted after the tense nine-hour drive through smoldering battle zones and our first depressing introduction to the zoo, we ate some of the canned food we had brought with us and went to bed.
It was not an agreeable night. The disheveled beds had been slept in before, and dust and grit layered the grimy sheets. The floors were so filthy we left smudgy footprints wherever we walked.
The key choice facing everyone in the hotel was whether to close the windows and steam in the sauna-temperature rooms or open them and be eaten alive by the seething clouds of flies and mosquitoes. Most chose the latter option.
I closed my eyes. Sleep was elusive, despite marrow-sapped exhaustion. I kept getting magnetically pulled to the window by the sounds of fighting that thundered across the city. Tracer bullets and parachute flares incinerated in the sky while tank shells screamed into targets with meteoric ferocity. Firefights erupted every few minutes or so, and just as I fell into a fitful doze, the stuttering hammer of machine guns somewhere on the streets roused me with a start. Radios regularly clattered into life in the hotel around me, and through the open windows I could hear the revving engines of tanks and Humvees seven floors below.

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