Bald ibis: casualty of war Joel Sartore: Getty

The northern bald ibis is now extinct in the Middle East. The final member of this genetically distinct Syrian population – a ringed female called Zenobia – was last seen in Palmyra in 2014, a few months before ISIS fighters showed up, says Gianluca Serra, an Italian conservation biologist who is its most persistent follower. The ibis has since disappeared.

With no mate, the bird’s future was probably doomed even without ISIS, but Zenobia’s story typifies the plight of wildlife in a region engulfed by conflict. The recent troubles there have led to human tragedy, as well as destruction of historical and cultural monuments. Now it appears, nature isn’t spared either.

Across the Middle East and parts of North Africa civil war, poaching to buy guns, and refugees’ urgent need for food and firewood, are extinguishing relic populations of wildlife and wrecking their habitats.


Gazelles flourished in the deserts of southern Libya until recently, says Gus Gintzburger, a rangeland ecologist familiar with the country, who is now based in Mariginiup, Western Australia.

Since the fall of Colonel Gaddafi, hunting parties have been killing wildlife for fun and meat in the lawless badlands of the “wild south”, he says. “No meat is imported to Libya these days, and local herdsmen are hoarding their camels, sheep and goats as capital because they don’t trust the banks,” says Gintzburger. “So people are turning to wild meat.”

Gazelle at great risk

Perhaps at greatest risk is the rhim gazelle (Gazella leptoceros), listed as endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. The species has seen a “serious decline” in recent years, says the IUCN. Even a decade ago, it calculated that perhaps only a few hundred remained in the wild, mostly in Libya and Algeria. With gun-toting gangs roaming the desert, no zoologists have reported being back to check out how the survivors are doing.

Migrating birds from Europe such as cranes, flamingos, bustards and herons are also being shot in large numbers on coastal wetlands that are no longer guarded, according to the Libya Wildlife Trust.

And the country’s treasured coastal juniper forests are under attack, says Ben Miller of the Kings Park botanic gardens in Perth, Australia. Before the Libyan conflict began in 2011, Miller ran a project with the Omar Al-Mukhtar University in Bayda to protect forests in Jebel, a biodiversity hotspot near Benghazi that is home to the endemic Alexandrian shrew, Crocidura aleksandrisi.

Armed groups have been taking advantage of the chaos since 2011 to fell the forests and take the land for farming, he says. Protected areas in Libya have never been extensive. But those that do exist are under serious threat.

Gintzburger says that in 2008, he fenced a 70-hectare area round the Jbebina oasis near the Tunisian border to protect migrating birds who rested there on their way south. “The last news I got is that this is now totally open to poachers and fighters, shooting ducks, herons, cranes and each other with Kalashnikovs,” he says.

Mali elephants and Yemen’s leopards

The Libyan conflict is threatening wildlife in neighbouring regions, too. UN observers say that weapons for the recent slaughter of a rare population of desert elephants in northern Mali came from Libya.

Blown to bits Reuters

Mali’s elephants may all be gone in three years, according to the Mali Elephant Project at the WILD Foundation. And the ivory may be funding Libyan and other Saharan militias.

Things are bad in Yemen, too, which is engulfed by a civil war. There, the Foundation for the Protection of the Arabian Leopard fears for the future of one of the world’s most endangered cats.

Fewer than 200 animals survive in the wild here and in neighbouring Oman. The animal hangs on in the mountains south of the capital Sana’a where the government has been fighting separatists for almost a decade. The last confirmed sighting came 18 months ago when local media published photographs of three dead leopards in the hands of armed poachers.

Syria’s northern bald ibis may already be gone, but much more is at stake. “A big concern is uncontrolled deforestation in the coastal mountains,” says Hassan Partow at the UN Environment Programme in Geneva.

“More than a million people have fled from the conflict zone around Aleppo to the coastal region and the Mediterranean forests,” says Aroub Almasri, a government ecologist at the National Commission of Biotechnology in Damascus. “These people need to fulfil their basic needs in food, electricity and fuel for warming, cooking and pumping water. They have no other choice but to do this in protected areas.”

Forest fires have raged uncontrolled in many coastal forests, she says. The Fronlok Forest, a once-protected area on the border with Turkey now being reclaimed by Syrian forces from militant groups, has suffered badly. “The degree of endemism is high here,” Almasri says, “and many nationally threatened species are found here, including Quercus cerris, an oak native to the region.”

Wardens still try to patrol such places, but lawlessness is rife, Almasri says. “The protected-area teams negotiate daily with local people to minimise damage, but no one can prevent the cutting of trees now.”

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