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Murrani hopes to take her training back to Baghdad Zoo.
photo: Tom Gillespie
To look at the petite Farah Murrani, a 28-year-old Iraqi veterinarian, wartorn Baghdad would be the last place you might picture her caring for animals. But until her recent arrival in the United States to continue her veterinary work, that is exactly were you would have found her.
A circuitous path eventually led her to the North Carolina Zoo in February to train with the zoo’s vetrinary staff for the next six months to a year. Life had been anything but dull for Murrani in Iraq even before the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the arrival of American military forces in 2004.
After her graduation from veterinarian school at the University of Baghdad in 1999, she spent the next two years running her own small-animal clinic there in the city where she had grown up with her family. But the clinic was taken from her by Iraqi intelligence officials and she was unable to practice animal care.
After the war broke out in Baghdad, there was an immediate need for help with the zoo’s animals that were starving as the war ragged around them. Murrani volunteered there for seven months with no pay until finally being hired for $100 a month.
“I didn’t do it for the money,” she said with a grin. Work there, she said, was daily chaos. “We had to just react each day (to the emergencies around us) rather than having a work schedule to accomplish things,” she said. “Each day we would come to the zoo, and everything would start falling apart. So we would try to put everything back together again before we went home. The next day, everything would be falling apart again; we could never make progress.”
Shortly after the war started, international animal-welfare groups—including the North Carolina Zoo—began getting veterinarians, medicine and supplies into Baghdad to assist in the care of the zoo animals and other domestic animals that could be helped.
Because of her close work with U.S. Army vets and soldiers and international relief workers at the Baghdad Zoo, it became evident that Murrani would be viewed as too pro-U.S. to remain safe.
“Many people didn’t consider that I was there helping the zoo and my country but assumed that I was just there helping the Americans,” she said. “It became dangerous for me to go to work.”
One of the U.S. Army veterinarians working with Murrani at the Iraqi zoo, Maj. Sam Barringer, was from Colorado and suggested to Murrani that she contact the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo there. She did, and soon was able to go there and train for four months.
N.C. Zoo Director Dr. David Jones had worked closely with Murrani, particularly after the war started in Iraq, offering assistance and helping coordinate an international relief effort for the Baghdad Zoo, similar to that of the Kabul Zoo in Afghanistan when war broke out there.
In January 2005, Murrani and two Baghdad Zoo associates came to the N.C. Zoo to speak to keepers and staff about her experiences as a vet in Iraq. Jones was so impressed with the young veterinarian and her dedicated work that he invited her to come to the zoo and shadow and train with the N.C. Zoo vet staff.
“Because of the (N.C.) Zoo’s work with the Baghdad Zoo, of course I said ‘yes,’” she said.
Murrani paticipates in a procedure.
photo: Tom Gillespie
Today, Murrani is working side-by-side with the N.C. Zoo’s veterinary team, gaining valuable experience, she said, to eventually take back to Iraq to begin the rebuilding process.
Since her arrival from Iraq, she’s been able to visit veterinary schools at North Carolina State University and at Kansas State University and said the biggest difference she sees in schools here and in Iraq is equipment and training. Since the first Gulf War in 1991, she said, vet students had been forced to use old books, equipment and facilities because of international economic sanctions on Iraq.
“I loved it when I got here and saw all the new, fancy equipment and new techniques,” she said. “The students are so lucky to have these facilities. They should really appreciate what they have. In Baghdad, we had nothing and just had to make it work—whatever we had.”
The biggest difference in zoo staff members here and at the Baghdad Zoo, she said, was in their daily approach to the job. “Back home, to the keepers, it was just a job,” she said. “Here it’s a completely different mentality, a different mind set. Keepers here work because they love the animals.”
Murrani wants to gain as much experience and expertise as she can and eventually take it back to Iraq to continue to upgrade animal care there and to be with her family.
“I’ve learned so much here,” she said, “especially about planning. That’s one of the main differences (from Iraq) that I’ve seen here. Back home, everything was just chaos—without planning.”
Some help for animals in Iraq has already begun. Before leaving Baghdad, Murrani worked closely with a group called Military Mascots whose purpose is to help find homes for the many stray dogs that soldiers find on the streets and bring to the Baghdad Zoo. Officially, general military orders prohibited soldiers from adopting, caring for or even feeding local animals. But that didn’t stop soldiers from befriending the animals, especially dogs, that became like pets to individuals and companies. When the soldiers relocated and couldn’t take the animals, they came to Murrani.
“I love dogs and couldn’t turn down any of them,” she said, “so we ended up with something like 60 dogs.”
She also formed the Iraqi Society for Animal Welfare with U.S. soldiers in January 2004. Unlike anything before in Iraq, the society was able to care for many of the animals and to get some of them into neighboring Jordan and other countries—at least out of the dangers of war and starvation. Murrani’s parents now run the society while she is away.
“I would like to change the attitude of the people there toward animals,” she said about her eventual return to Iraq, “to stop them from throwing things at the animals and giving cigarettes to monkeys—those sorts of things. We’ve already made a difference there, but I’ve seen what can be done, and I know I can do more.”
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