Ailing lion, bear finally flown out of Mosul zoo

Top Stories

Ailing lion, bear finally flown out of Mosul zoo

Arbil (Iraq) - A group of veterinarians from the Four Paws International charity took the animals out of war-battered Mosul

By AFP

  • Follow us on
  • google-news
  • whatsapp
  • telegram

Published: Tue 11 Apr 2017, 5:17 PM

Last updated: Wed 12 Apr 2017, 10:18 AM

 Simba the lion and Lula the bear, the ailing last two residents of Mosul zoo, were flown out of Iraq on Monday to receive emergency care from an animal welfare group.
A group of veterinarians from the Four Paws International charity took the animals out of war-battered Mosul and after many administrative delays finally managed to fly them out to Jordan from the Iraqi Kurdish capital of Arbil.
"We're in the plane with the animals, we're leaving now," said Amir Khalil, a 52-year-old Egyptian-Austrian vet who headed the Four Paws mission.
The doctor found the pair covered in dirt and excrement in February, abandoned in their cages at the privately owned zoo in the eastern half of Mosul. Iraqi forces launched a massive operation to retake the city, Iraq's second largest, from the Daesh group in October and spent weeks battling the militants street by street before eventually retaking the east bank in January.
When Four Paws reached the zoo, nobody had entered the cages in weeks and no other animals apart from the female bear and the male lion had survived.
When Khalil and his team came back to the region in late March, they had one goal which was to remove the animals temporarily from Iraq so they could receive proper veterinary care.
It was supposed to be a formality, but it took Khalil and his team two weeks to finally squeeze the right paperwork out of the administrative confusion that prevails in post-militant Mosul. In late March, Khalil had put the two beasts to sleep, taken them out of their filthy cages on stretchers and loaded them aboard a truck using a crane, hoping to be on an aircraft in a matter of hours. The truck was stopped at a checkpoint, however, and a second evacuation attempt the following day also failed.
The two animals remained on a dusty roadside for nine days before the necessary permits were secured. The lion developed a respiratory problem as a result of the delay.


More news from