When ISIS took over a sprawling park near his home in Mosul, Iraq, Abu Laith was confident he could protect his pregnant wife and their 13 children.
He wasn’t so sure about the zoo animals.
The brash mechanic and National Geographic enthusiast had been caring for a menagerie of lions, bears, monkeys, birds and other creatures since before the Islamic State conquered the city in June of 2014. As ISIS’s brand of religious intimidation and violence spread through Mosul, the zoo started to crumble, and the animals began dying one-by-one.
But Abu Laith was determined to save them.
“Within every living being, he knew instinctively, there was a personality, a life with needs and likes and things they hated,” writes Louise Callaghan in her new book, “Father of Lions: One Man’s Remarkable Quest to Save the Mosul Zoo” (Forge Books), out Jan. 14.
Born with the name Imad, he eventually adopted the moniker Abu Laith, which means “father of lions.” He’d grown up loving animals — from glorious beasts to mangy street dogs — despite the fact that his parents viewed many of them as haram, or “unclean” per the Koran. But the young Abu Laith saw humanity in all creatures.
Decades later, as a rowdy, redheaded patriarch, he still felt happiest among his four-legged friends.
Abu Laith started helping out around the Mosul Zoo in 2013, when he realized its owner, a wealthy, well-connected man named Ibrahim, didn’t care about his charges. The first time he visited, Abu Laith was “appalled” to find the majority of the animals were skittish, bored and underfed.
With Ibrahim’s blessing, he became the “self-appointed zookeeper,” showing up at the zoo after work most evenings to clean cages, feed the animals and watch National Geographic videos on YouTube to figure out what each particular species needed most. He took a particular liking to a newborn lion that he called Zombie.
He was working for free, but he considered it training for when he would open his own zoo nearby. He had even lined up investors. But then, tragedy struck: His would-be business partner was murdered, and Abu Laith spent four months in jail after he was wrongfully accused of the crime.
Still, Abu Laith was naturally optimistic. At first, when ISIS starting moving into the city, he ignored its sinister presence, Callaghan writes: “He didn’t think too much about the suicide bombs and the kidnappings that plagued Mosul, and that had taken a handful of his friends and relatives. Abu Laith wasn’t prone to introspection.”
But he became more upset when changes within the city started affecting his family, including the furriest members down the block.
Abu Laith and his wife, Lumia, were not religious. He’d enjoyed a brief love affair with Islam and had even paid to build a mosque nearby his house, but it ended badly after he fell off the roof trying to adjust the speakers for the daily call to prayer. He took the accident as a sign and he rejected the faith.
But as ISIS took hold of the country, Abu Laith and his family were increasingly forced to conform to strict religious rules.
His wife and daughters were miserable when they learned they’d have to start wearing heavy, fundamentalist-approved garments that covered them from head to toe every time they went outside. There was also a food shortage, which had started even before ISIS moved in but got much worse as the city became more difficult, and frightening, to traverse. With plenty of mouths to feed — and a baby on the way — Lumia had to stay home with their brood, and Abu Laith wondered how they’d make it work.
Of course, Abu Laith was fearful for the animals, too.
He fed them whatever he could get his hands on; surprisingly, “the monkeys liked olives and pickles.” Less surprising: the lions “did not like rice.” But as time passed, even those odd rations got harder to find. Abu Laith knew his beloved trio of lions — Zombie and his parents — would starve without meat, while the mother-and-son pair of Syrian brown bears, named Lula and Warda, needed honey.
To his wife’s annoyance, he rallied their children to the cause of saving the animals.
He sent them begging to their neighbors and local grocers for scraps for the zoo. He also was clear about the personal sacrifices they’d have to make. “You’ll have to go hungry sometimes to feed the animals,” he told them. “If there’s meat, we’ll feed it to the lions and eat rice for ourselves instead.”
The kids agreed, but even still the animals suffered. After months and months of ISIS rule, “Zombie was growing restless, pacing around his cage,” Callaghan writes. “Father was wasting away, just a ragged coat and bones . . . Mother, however, was angry.” She eventually got so desperate that she jumped a fence and attacked the young bear, Warda. He survived the assault, but lost an arm to Mother’s appetite.
It didn’t help that Abu Laith was stuck in his house all day. After upsetting an ISIS caliph by drinking whiskey, which the Koran forbids, and failing to show up to mosque, he had to hide in his attic indefinitely or face certain execution. He paid a young friend a modest salary to look after the zoo — it was better than nothing — but he knew no one cared about the animals as much as he did.
If there’s meat, we’ll feed it to the lions and eat rice for ourselves instead.
- Abu Laith to his family while trying to save the animals
He hid for two years, sneaking out only twice: once for the birth of his son, Shuja, and another time to check on the zoo. But after the Iraqi army successfully wrested the city back from ISIS’s control in the summer of 2017, Abu Laith returned to the zoo and was devastated to see what the years of deprivation and neglect had done.
The animals’ cages were filthy. Some had escaped; others had died. His relief at seeing that Mother, Father and Zombie were still alive was quickly undermined by a horrifying image: Lula, the mother bear, was struggling to bury Warda, who had died of starvation. Meanwhile, the Iraqi soldiers wandered through the park, shocked that any animals had survived at all.
“Aren’t you people hungry?” one asked Abu Laith. “Why didn’t you kill them for meat?”
The question was too much for the already emotional zookeeper. “Abu Laith, with tears still in his eyes, burst into a blank fury . . . ‘You don’t eat animals who have earned your respect,’ ” he seethed.
A few months later, with the city in shambles and food still scarce, an unlikely offer of help arrived.
One afternoon, an Egyptian veterinarian named Dr. Amir Khalil was scrolling through Facebook when he spotted a shocking photo. A concerned bystander, unconnected to the zoo, “had posted a picture of a half-dead bear, next to a half-dead lion,” Callaghan writes. There was a caption: “This is how the animals are living in Mosul Zoo . . . Can anyone help?”
Khalil, who worked for the Austrian charity Four Paws, decided that he could. He traveled to Iraq soon afterwards and was horrified by what he saw.
The smell at the zoo hit him first: a nauseating mix of urine and old feces. The park itself with filled with craters from the explosives the army had dropped to oust the ISIS stronghold.
Abu Laith bounded towards him. “Are you a doctor?” he asked eagerly. When Khalil confirmed that he was, Abu Laith immediately guided him towards Zombie. By then, he was one of only two animals left at the zoo, the other being Lula the bear. Mother had killed and eaten Father and then died herself. Abu Laith and Khalil agreed that the remaining duo needed to be moved out of Mosul as soon as possible.
They came up with a plan: Khalil would leave Iraq and figure out the best way to transport the beasts. In the meantime, Abu Laith would administer medicine — courtesy of Four Paws — and buy appropriate food such as meat and honey with money that Khalil gave him.
Once he left Mosul, Khalil’s first order of business was getting in touch with the owner of the zoo. He got Ibrahim on the phone and immediately realized that for him, “the animals were nothing more than money-making entertainment . . . that had lost their value.” Ibrahim told Khalil that he could do what he wanted with the ailing lion and bear.
A short time later, Khalil returned to Mosul with a set of custom-made cages and the right paperwork. Everything was in order, but after packing up the animals, Khalil and his colleagues were detained at the very first checkpoint. It seemed that Ibrahim had put out word that the animals were about to be stolen.
“Your permissions are canceled,” the armed soldier warned Khalil when he tried to argue.
He had no choice but to listen. Solemnly, he returned the animals to the zoo and then set out to find Ibrahim.
The owner demanded a million dollars in exchange for the animals. Khalil tried to explain that they had no monetary value; without his help, they would die. In the end, he agreed to pay a “very small fraction” of the exorbitant sum. Even then, it took another eight days of negotiations with Iraqi officials to undo the problems that Ibrahim had created.
Now, thanks to his perseverance, the animals are thriving. Lula lives in a nature sanctuary in Jordan. Zombie, fully recovered from fleas, parasites and malnutrition, roams the plains of a sanctuary in South Africa.
As for Abu Laith, the father of now 15 children is thrilled for his old charges. And he’s far from done with animals; as Callaghan writes, “He is consumed with plans to start a new zoo.”