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Zoo animals are seldom seen at airports, but Queen Alia International airport in Amman, Jordan, is remarkable for its exotic arrivals. On 11 April, a flight landed carrying a bear called Lula and a lion called Simba, the only two surviving animals from Mosul zoo in Iraq. More than 40 other animals had died during the fight to liberate Mosul from Isil – either caught up in the bullets and blasts, or from starvation.
By the time Simba and Lula were rescued, they were emaciated, wounded and deeply traumatised. It would take two weeks for Simba to leave his shelter and explore his new home. Then, on 10 August, airport staff welcomed five lions, two tigers, two bears, two hyenas and two husky dogs from the Magic World – a zoo just outside Aleppo, Syria, which didn’t look much like a zoo after six years of civil war. Around 110 animals had died, the keepers were nowhere to be seen, enclosures were filled with filth and mortar shells, and the few creatures not wiped out by the war were getting worse by the hour.
The safe arrival of these animals in Jordan marked the culmination of a particularly hard few months for Amir Khalil, 52, a vet who works for Four Paws, an Austria-based animal-rescue organisation, and the instigator of both operations. Rescuing the animals was costly and dangerous. An Isil suicide bomber blew himself up outside the zoo in Mosul, forcing Khalil – who had just arrived to save Simba and Lula – to leave again. Getting the animals out of Aleppo meant crossing through rebel-, government- and al-Qaeda-held territory.
There was machine-gun fire, and endless red tape involved in repeatedly trying (and failing) to get the animals through checkpoints. In recent years we have heard much about the human cost of war: 400,000 killed in Syria; an estimated 40,000 civilian casualties in Mosul alone. Why so much effort for a few animals? Or, as officials liked to say to Khalil, ‘just’ animals.
‘Humans have the option to escape but animals caged in a zoo don’t have this option,’ he says. And yes, of course, there has been profound human suffering but animals, too, should give us pause. ‘It was humans who brought animals to these places,’ he says – and they depend on us to get them out. ‘They cannot speak, they have no political agenda, but they are messengers from the darkness, they bring hope.’ ...
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