Lion, wolves and bears draw crowds at Baghdad pet shop

Sabah Alazawi is doing a roaring trade these days at his Baghdad pet shop — and not only because he has a lion for sale. Along with dogs, he also offers bears, wolves, monkeys and vultures.

While hundreds of people visit his menagerie daily, most are there because it offers a free alternative to an outing to the zoo, rather than to buy.

But Alazawi, an ex-soldier who has long harboured a passion for wild animals, doesn’t mind in the least.

“Children and families are depressed in Iraq. I am proud to give some happiness to these people,” he says, as crowds mill around his pet shop in Mashatel street, a leafy thoroughfare in northern Baghdad’s Adhamiyah district.

Jutting out on to the pavement are three cages that serve as the homes respectively of two young bears, a lion cub and a pair of baboons.

Another monkey, chained at the leg, hops from one cage to another while two vultures are tied to their perch nearby, completing the strange scene that meets the bemused gaze of passersby and motorists queuing at a security checkpoint on the other side of the road.

More curiosities can be found inside the shop, which gets around 400 visitors a day.

According to Alazawi, the numbers increased dramatically once the sectarian violence which ravaged the Iraqi capital from 2006 to 2008 began to decline.

Wolves, peacocks, two young alligators, an ostrich, a badger and a porcupine are also in residence, and the next arrivals — a pair of hyenas and two more baby lions — are expected soon.

“Animals are my passion,” the 59-year-old Alazawi says with a smile.

An array of faded press articles and old photos cover the walls of his office, depicting him alongside exotic animals, including lions or with an uromastyx — a giant spiny-tailed lizard that lives in the Iraqi desert.

Alazawi’s obsession runs in the family. In one of the photos, his son Ammar is shown sitting on a doberman at the age of two. In another, taken 20 years later, a live snake wraps itself around Ammar’s neck.

Alazawi opened his exotic animal shop two decades ago, but he traded in smaller creatures until he splashed out on his first lion in 2000.

Since then he says he has sold around 10 kings of the jungle — mainly to Iraq’s zoos and at a price of around 6,000 dollars each.

He declines to discuss details about where the animals come from but says nobody has ever bothered him about the legality of his business.

He has also raised three bears, one of which was confiscated by the US military who took it to the Baghdad zoo and another which he sold to the zoo in the southern province of Diwaniya for 1,500 dollars.

AFP