The Pride of Baghdad

This comic tells the "ripped from real life" story of four lions who escaped from the Baghdad Zoo in 2003 during an American bombing raid. Later, the lions were shot by American troops when the lions charged them during a patrol. This graphic novel tells the story of what those lions saw, experienced and talked about during their time of freedom and just before it.

The Pride is made up of Zill, an adult Male, Safa, an old lioness who is blind in one eye, Noor, a younger lioness who is trying to escape their habitat at the zoo and be free, and her cub, Ali, a young male lion who is still a child. Despite being the top predator at the zoo, the lions are not well-fed, so when they are thrown the carcass of a mule, partially skinned, Zill is only too ready to eat it. But that is when the attack comes, and though the human keepers have fled, the cats take shelter in their enclosure den.

Afterwards, most, if not all, of the animals are loose and stampeding in fear. In the confusion, the Monkeys capture Ali and want to make him part of their pack, by cutting him with a sharp stone. Noor, who wanted to stay in the zoo enclosure, stirs herself to free him by killing the leader of the monkeys, then decides to go with the others as they leave the zoo. Along the way, they encounter a turtle who tells them why the two-legs are fighting: over a black poison that lives in the earth and poisons any creature who comes into contact with it. He is the only survivor of a group of turtles when the river was poisoned by the floating black stuff, and so he has given up caring about anything the humans do.

The pack is hungry and goes hunting for meat, encountering a group of stampeding horses. They follow them into Baghdad, and find a temple which is now home to a bear who fights with the lions, but they defeat him after Zill injures him and Noor and Saba stampede the horses over the bear's body. Then Ali takes them up a hill and they watch the sunset before being killed by the troopers.

The story is sad, and examines the nature of freedom. Though they are imprisoned at the start by the bars and concrete of their enclosure, the story examines what it is to be free, and what freedom truly means. For even though their bodies are free of the enclosure for most of the story, they all are in different kinds of chains. Noor's chains are the clearest: she is imprisoned by her memories of life in the wild and how she was raped by her brother and his friends, other lions who didn't have a pack of their own. Ali, by contrast, has never known freedom or the wild. He was born in a cage, and constantly wonders what life in the wild is like. And of course, he will never know.

This book left me with a sad and melancholy feeling, and the ending made me cry, for even as the lions lay dead, the carnage still went on all around. Is anyone in Baghdad truly free? or is death the only freedom they can hope for, like the lions? The book invites you to decide for yourself, even as the picture it paints is bleak. This is an excellent graphic novel that gives more questions than it answers, and asks you to examine the nature of freedom amidst the violence. Highly recommended.