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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: January/February 2008

Veterinarian works under fire to help Baghdad residents keep pets alive

 

BAGHDAD -- "People in Baghdad still want to look after animals despite everything," 26-year veterinarian Nameer Abdul Fatah told Agence France-Presse in early January 2008.

"More Muslims keep dogs as pets than is generally believed,"

Fatah added. "There are many expensive dogs like Pekinese in the city. People keep them inside at home, and don't take them for walks because of the danger" associated with life in a war zone.

Trained in small animal medicine in East Germany, Fatah, 46, often treats animals who have been injured in the sectarian strife that has torn apart Baghdad since the 2003 U.S. invasion. He acknowledged that "The windows of my car were blown out once, when I was driving to examine a client's dog, and another time I got bad wounds in the leg from shrapnel. But I was never the target," Fatah stipulated.

His job is more dangerous now than before 2003, Fatah said, but not necessarily more difficult.

"It was very difficult to get drugs under Saddam," Fatah told Agence France-Press, "because taxes made it impossible to travel and U.N. sanctions made it difficult to import anything. Now I can buy the medicine I need from abroad."

Fatah said that he believes he is one of only two veterinarians left in Iraq who are trained in small animal medicine.

No reports about the status of pet dogs in Iraq reached ANIMAL PEOPLE in the 11 years before the U.S. invasion. There were no humane societies in Iraq during the Saddam Hussein regime. After the U.S. invasion, veterinarian Farah Murrani formed the Iraqi Society for Animal Welfare on the premises of the Baghdad Zoo, and for about a year treated street dogs and feral cats at Al-Zawra Park in Baghdad.

Working with the Humane Centre for Animal Welfare in Jordan and Military Mascots, founded by Bonnie Buckley in Merrimac, Massachusetts, Murrani also helped U.S. soldiers to send home about 40 animals they had adopted in Iraq.

Death threats forced Murrani to flee Iraq in 2004. The Iraq Society for Animal Welfare continued for about a year without a vet before apparently falling dormant in 2005.

Military Mascots has continued to help U.S. soldiers to send home adopted pets. Otherwise, the Agence France-Press profile of Nameer Abdul Farah was the first report ANIMAL PEOPLE had received about dogs in Iraq since 2005 that mentioned them except as victims of multiple bombings at the Ghazil pet market in Baghdad, shooting and poisoning in the name of rabies control, and random mayhem by soldiers.

Reuters on December 18, 2007 reported that an employee of the Blackwater private security firm employed in various capacities by the U.S. government shot a street dog who had become a pet at the New York Times' Baghdad compound. The New York Times' staffers' dog apparently challenged the approach of a Blackwater explosives-sniffing dog. The New York Times itself did not report the incident, but acknowledged that it happened.

--Merritt Clifton