Under a dim light, Iraqis gather around a ring where two roosters leap with great wing beats and seek each other with their beaks.
In the port city of Basra, these amateurs perpetuate fights that have been practiced for decades.
On the narrow bleachers of a cafe that serves as a gallodrome, spectators chain cigarettes and glasses of tea, some smoking hookah.
They are dozens to have come to attend a weekend evening at a cockfight.
The two red-crested birds turn around on a filthy carpet, tightly glued to each other in a violent dance, chaining beaks that make blood bleed.
The confrontation, which can last between an hour or two, ends when the animals run out, or when one of the owners intervenes to forfeit and spare his rooster, explains to AFP Riad Ali, septuagenarian retired and referee hobbyist for twenty years.
Several evenings in a row, an AFP photographer witnessed these fights organized for decades in Basra, a large city in southern Iraq.
In a country that is still largely conservative, discipline gives rise to bets.
It doesn’t matter if gambling is forbidden in Islam.
In general, the owners of the roosters — more rarely the spectators — bet money: between 25,000 and 100,000 Iraqi dinars (about 20 and 75 dollars).
Banned in many countries, cockfighting is commonly practiced across the planet.
Popular in India or the Philippines, they are tolerated in certain departments in northern France or overseas territories in the name of tradition.
“Since I was born in 1949 this discipline has existed. It’s a very old, popular competition, dating back to the 1920s or even before,” said referee Riad Ali.
He has been immersed in this universe since his youngest age, his father having passed on this “hobby” to him from the age of ten.
According to him, the practice landed in Basra via the boats that anchored in the port.
Naji Hamza, also in his 70s, has attended competitions since the 1970s, even though fighting was “banned during Saddam Hussein’s time. We were in isolated houses, not in cafes, or in public”, says -il, in reference to the former dictator overthrown in 2003 by an American invasion.
Mohamed, a mechanic, has been involved in combat since the early 1990s.
His three roosters, bought in Turkey, cost him 1,100 or 900 dollars a head.
“It’s a hobby, a hobby, only in winter. In the evening we come to the café, we spend one or two hours, we see friends,” says the fifty-year-old.
27/02/2023 09:50:13 – Bassora (Iraq) (AFP) © 2023 AFP
