Letter from Mideast: What have Lebanon's Arabian horses done wrong?

"These horses aren't pets. They're family. I raised them, trained them, stayed up at night grooming them, feeding them, loving them. And then, in one strike, the Israeli military wiped them out. For what reason?"

by Dana Halawi

BEIRUT, Aug. 13 (Xinhua) -- The road to Kafr Kila, a village in southeastern Lebanon, reeked of charred wood and something fouler -- a scent that clawed at my throat.

In mid-July, beneath Israeli drones sounding like angry hornets, I stepped onto the ruins of Ibrahim Yehya's horse farm. Where Arabian stallions once pranced, only twisted metal feeders and dark stains on concrete remained.

Yehya stood amid the ruins, smoke clinging to his bloodied black shirt. His hands trembled as they brushed dust from a half-buried saddle. "Thirty years of work," whispered the man in his 50s. "Gone in minutes."

When his eyes met mine, rage and grief warred in his voice: "These horses aren't pets. They're family. I raised them, trained them, stayed up at night grooming them, feeding them, loving them. And then, in one strike, the Israeli military wiped them out. For what reason?"

He pointed to the scorched earth where he used to stand and watch the horses run: "I washed them with the trainers, combed their manes, talked to them when no one else was around. Now there's nothing left."

Yehya said a group of livestock specialists came to his horse farm, assessing the damage and pledging assistance, but he declined to pin his hopes on those promises. "I will rebuild everything, from scratch, with my own hands. I won't wait for anyone," he told me, resolutely.

I searched the carnage, trying to get a glimpse of the farm's former glory from the wreckage: A metal halter was dangling from a scorched wall. A green ribbon was stuck in the rubble -- "Champion of the South 2022," this was the title earned by a mare that once brought pride to this land. Ten purebred Arabian horses were lying dead, burned or shredded by shrapnel. Five survivors were suffering from broken limbs and severe burns.

Under a shattered oak, I found Abdallah Abu Dawood, a fifty-something veterinarian. The man was kneeling beside a bleeding mare when I approached him, checking pulses, giving painkillers, pressing gauze onto the shrapnel wounds, and whispering comforting words.

Shells thudded in the distance, but he had no time to be bothered by the danger, because there were more wounded horses waiting to be rescued.

"I may not be able to save all of them," he told me, fingers working against time. "We don't have the tools or the medicine. But I'll try."

Nearby, Jaber Al-Abdallah, a longtime breeder, was wiping blood from a filly's face. He then hand-fed another, and brushed a third.

"They are noble creatures," he said, fighting to contain his anger and grief. "They feel. They fear. They suffer. I never thought I'd live to see them bleed and cry out like this. I didn't think war would come for them, too."

"I'll keep caring for them," he said. "Even more attentively now. They deserve it."

Then, I saw her -- a white mare, silently bleeding. Her eyes held mine: pain, confusion, accusation. In that gaze, I felt powerless. If those creatures could think, they would scratch their heads about what "crime" they had committed to deserve such violence, on top of their pure existence in this land of war.

As I left, a faint whinny rose from the wreckage. It was the sound of a creature with no weapons, no words, but a still-beating heart remembering the green pastures.

The sound chased me down the road, mingling with the distant shelling. In my rearview mirror, I saw smoke coiling skyward from what was once a sanctuary of sweat, hay, and thundering hooves.

Lebanon, a member of the World Arabian Horse Organization, once had around 700 registered purebred Arabian horses -- each DNA-tested, tagged, and recorded. Some 40 of them were lost during Israeli airstrikes on southern Lebanon in April, according to Lebanon's Agriculture Ministry, which promised vaccination programs and technical support for the remaining 650 still alive across the country.

But as far as I can tell, for men like Yehya, statistics are empty stalls. His fight now is against a deeper erasure -- the kind that happens when war devours not just lives, but meaning itself. ■