A slaughtered dog’s head was found on the roof of a house in Baharka, north of Erbil city on Thursday. The dog had been beheaded that morning and chopped into pieces by a Syrian Kurdish man after he sought help from a sorcerer to cure his wife’s inability to conceive a child, an issue she said has existed since the couple tied the knot three years ago.
“We did it [beheaded the dog] to have children. We did it because a dog’s head will grant us children. We did not kill the dog. A cleric from Syria told us to do this,” Dijlah Mohammed, the perpetrator’s wife, told Rudaw’s Rebwar Ali on Tuesday, claiming that the dog was already dead when her husband carried out the act.
“My husband went to work near Kasnazan road, and on the road, he found a dead dog. The cleric told us that a dead dog’s head is good for conceiving children,” she said.
Farman Fazel, head of the Kurdistan Animals Protection organization and a leading animal rights activist, strongly condemned Mohammed’s words as “far from the truth,” accusing the woman of misrepresenting Islamic teachings and arguing that the dog was alive when it was beheaded.
“When she says she reads the Quran, I get suspicious. Islam does not allow those who have a Quran in their household to behead an innocent dog. You cannot hurt an animal which God has created and we call on relevant authorities to not neglect this case in any way,” Fazel said, in strong opposition to the wife’s reasoning behind the action.
“The action that these people have done is far from human ethics and morals,” he emphasized.
A large number of people in the Kurdistan Region believe in sorcery and are vulnerable to fraud artists who make promises of happiness, prosperity, and success. Some people have lost large sums of money to the scammers.
According to Fazel, many sorcerers conduct witchcraft in the Kurdistan Region under the pretext of being religious scholars.
He called on the Kurdistan Region’s endowment ministry to take action against individuals practicing witchcraft for religious reasons.
Hussein Grdachali, a religious cleric in Erbil, stressed that cutting off animal organs is frowned upon in Islam and that people practicing black magic are considered kuffar, or infidels in Islam.
“Cutting off animal organs, the act of inflicting pain on an animal, according to Prophet Mohammed, will come back to be carried out against you on the Day of Judgement,” Grdachali said.
The cleric lamented the presence of dozens of sorcerers in the Kurdistan Region’s streets and alleyways, calling on authorities to express seriousness in tackling the issue.
After news of the act surfaced on Thursday, Baharka police raided the perpetrator’s residence. They arrested him, confiscating the dog’s severed head and discovering around four kilograms of suspicious meat in the freezer.
“We arrested an individual who, upon the request of a sorcerer, beheaded a dog and cut the animal into pieces for the purpose of having a child,” said Baharka Mayor Tola Mahdi Khoshnaw.
The dog’s head and the confiscated meat were taken to the Kurdistan Region’s central veterinary laboratory to examine whether the meat belonged to a dog or another animal. The results of the investigation are scheduled for Wednesday.
Ari Sabir, a lawyer, said that the penalty for the crime of hurting or killing an animal in the Kurdistan Region and Iraq is “either a penalty or a prison sentence which does not exceed three years.”
Initial concerns grew about the perpetrator with locals mistaking him for an owner of a restaurant, frightened that he could have been potentially serving dog meat. However, it later emerged that he works as a blacksmith.
Violence against stray dogs is rife in the Kurdistan Region with the animals often considered a menace and public health risk. They are commonly shooed away, beaten, hit with sticks, and killed by cars and gunshots. There are over 300,000 stray dogs in the Kurdistan Region, according to the Sulaimani-based Kurdistan Green Party.
A few years ago, a policeman in Erbil proudly admitted to killing around 3,000 stray dogs, 40 of whom he shot in one night.
