For 12-year-old Lula, the days are clear. Lazing in the sun, playing by the water bowl and today: lunch with a leaf of lettuce. Lula is a brown bear. For years she was a landmark in the zoo in the Iraqi city of Mosul, until the terrorist group Islamic State (IS) came to power. In the years of war that followed, the beasts threatened to starve and began to eat each other. Only Lula survived, scrawny, along with a male lion.
They were evacuated: the lion to South Africa, Lula to Al-Ma’wa, a vast 110 hectare wooded hill in northern Jordan. Not a zoo, as company manager Moustafa Khraisat (28) emphasizes, but a reserve. “The only one of its kind in the Middle East and North Africa.” The animals do not have cages but habitats. They come for their rest. Visitors buy a ticket for the equivalent of 7 euros, but have to take the risk that the animals will not show themselves.
A tour of Al-Ma’wa is also a tour of the hotbeds of the Arab world. There are lions and bears from Syria, Iraq and the occupied Gaza Strip. Often their evacuation begins with a cry for help on social media. Who’s coming to rescue them? The rescue operations are being set up with money from the Austrian-based animal rights organization Four Paws. In the case of Lula, it was not easy: she stood in a crate at a checkpoint for days, waiting for the Iraqi army to give permission for the passage. “She came in with stress,” Khraisat says, “but it’s completely gone.”
Helicopter Flights
Bang-bang-bang. Gunshots echo between the hills. “A military base,” Khraisat says. According to him, the animals are not bothered by it. It is very different when helicopters are flying overhead. “We have two bears from Aleppo. The first months they immediately fled into their pen at that noise and started banging on the doors.’ The barrel bombs that fell on Aleppo for years were dropped from helicopters.
Al-Ma’wa works with an annual budget of half a million euros, from both Four Paws and a foundation of the Jordanian princess Alia bint Hussein. Nothing is left to chance: experts establish a diet for every animal. In addition to carcasses, the lions also receive supplements (‘predator powder’) from England. Khraisat: ‘Be careful not to get too loving, I tell the caretakers. No matter how playful they are, they can just bite your hand off.’
He is not pleased with the way zoos in the Middle East work. One of the lions underwent three major operations after arriving in Al-Ma’wa after a director of a Gaza zoo declawed her with a hedge trimmer. “He wanted the kids to play with her.”
Illegal trade
In the bright afternoon sun, the manager has already moved on, past two wild rat snakes entwined in a mating dance. ‘Scar!’ he shouts at a meter high fence. ‘Scar, where are you? Have you seen him?’ After some hesitation, he determines that the elderly hyena wants to sleep today.
Of the almost seventy animals in Al-Ma’wa, almost half do not come from the war, but from the illegal circuit. “There is a worldwide trade in tigers, lions, you name it,” says Marek Trela (68), the Polish director. ‘You can earn a lot of money from tiger bones: many people think that they have medicinal properties. In China and Vietnam bear bile is used in homeopathic remedies.’
Illegally traded lions turn up in neighboring Saudi Arabia, where the nouveaux riches easily pay 5 to 10 thousand euros for a cub. On Instagram and TikTok you can see the owners frolicking with capuchin monkeys, lions and tigers. They have hundreds of thousands of followers. “They see that as normal,” Khraisat grumbles. ‘Therein lies the danger. They are wild animals, you should not keep them as pets.’
According to him, the fascination with lions goes back centuries. In the verses of Ahmed Al-Mutanabbi, the great poet of the Abbasid Empire, the lion is a symbol of strength and masculinity. Contemporary Ibn Khalawayh (died 980) collected 400 different names for the king of the animal kingdom, ranging from ‘the sublime’ to ‘he whose language is ill-mannered’.
Dependent on people
The authorities in Jordan are among the few in the region to act against the illegal trade. The police have a special unit for it. Agents pose as buyers when a wild animal shows up on social media. Five years ago, for example, when a Jordanian offered a crocodile online. The plainclothes police officer asked for his papers, after which the man pulled out a gun and shot an officer. The perpetrator is serving a life sentence.
Is there a way back for the bears and lions from Aleppo and Mosul? Khraisat shakes his head. “Syria is in ruins, Iraq is complicated.” More importantly, the animals have become completely dependent on humans over the years. At best, bear Lula could go to the forests of northern Turkey, the only area where her species is still found in the wild. However, that’s not going to happen. Khraisat: “She wouldn’t survive.”
He and his colleagues see education as the key. ‘We want a change of mentality. We visit schools with the message: animals belong in the wild, not in a cage.’ In an ideal world without war, the reservation could be abolished. Until then, Lula can laze about carefree.