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DUHOK, Kurdistan Region — Thousands of chickens are dying in Duhok, causing a nightmare for local farmers trying to make a living.
At a farm in Duhok’s village of Bakhurni, 6,000 chickens have died in the past four days.
“1,500 have died since last night. If it continues like this, it will be a disaster and there will be none left in the barn,” farmer Vadar Mohammed told Rudaw on Tuesday.
“So far I have lost about 30 million Iraqi Dinars ($20,570). If it continues this way, we will lose about 60-70 million Iraqi Dinars ($41,153- 48,012),” he added.
Mevan Mohammed had about 18,000 chickens in his farm. He says half of them have died in a month due to a respiratory disease known as infectious bronchitis (IB).
“When we visit the veterinarians, they say it is because of IB [respiratory disease]. We don’t know if it is because of IB or bird flu. We had about 18,000 chickens and we have lost 45-50 percent of them,” he said.
Bird flu, or avian influenza, killed 110,000 chickens in Iraq’s Samarra last week.
However, vets at the University of Duhok say the virus is not the Kurdistan Region.
“We don’t have bird flu yet in Duhok province. We heard the agricultural minister saying yesterday that we don’t have this disease in the Kurdistan Region. This virus can be classified into 44 sub-groups, and they are not all dangerous. There are some which aren’t harmful,” said Dr Luqman Taib Barwari, Dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine.
In an interview with Rudaw’s Sangar Abdulrahman on Sunday, Begard Talabani, the Kurdistan Region’s minister of agriculture and water resources, said no cases of bird flu have been confirmed in the Region’s farms.
Translation and video editing by Sarkawt Mohammed
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