Perhaps the fifth missile of the afternoon arcs over the top of the enclosure. Again a miss, but they are getting closer. This one hits the wooden platform upon which the magnificent white lion is dozing in the warm sunshine.
‘Hey!’ shouts the stone thrower at the lion. Then to his companions: ‘Is he sleeping? Is he alive? Is he even real?’
Two aspects of this scene strike one as unusual if not shocking in the context of a 21st century zoological gardens. The first is that the helpless lion is being pelted by visitors. The second is that the visiting public are wandering about the zoo armed to the teeth with assault rifles, and even belt-fed light machine guns.
Most of the victorious Taliban foot soldiers who swept into Kabul last month hail from rural provinces, often hundreds of miles away. They have never been to the capital, nor any other city, before. And so, in their downtime – like the soldiers of any other conquering army down the centuries – they have been taking in the sights. Some soliders have already been pictured enjoying dodgems and pedalos.
Relaxing Taliban fighters, still carrying their weapons, join families and children at Kabul Zoo to see some of the star attractions: a White lion, an Afghan leopard, wolves, ducks, pelicans and the ever popular bunny rabbit
And this weekend Mail photographer Jamie Wiseman and I spent two days observing and mingling with the Taliban at Kabul zoo.
It was a surreal and sometimes disturbing experience. It also yielded these extraordinary photographs as the fighters eagerly consented to pose as if schoolboys on a day trip. Some would have been schoolboys if in Britain, so young were they. Here, they had American M4s and M16 rifles rather than lunch boxes slung over their shoulders.
The group we came across were from Uruzgan, a largely tribal, opium-poppy-growing province next to Helmand in the country’s south.
Daily Mail feature writer Richard Pendlebury pictured in a shop in Kabul, where he was offered what were claimed to be the pelts of an Afghan leopard and cubs
The legendary mujahideen commander Ahmad Shah Massoud had been known as the ‘Lion of Panjshir’. But a real African lion – or any kind of lion – is as foreign to the experience of these Uruzgan backwoodsmen as a blue whale or a kangaroo.
The wolves trotting anxiously round and round in a nearby enclosure seemed to elicit greater respect from them. They knew from experience or by family legend what such creatures can do to livestock or a lonely traveller. There are still about 1,000 roaming wild in Afghanistan.
The lion, on the other hand, was a mystery. And a mystery that wasn’t providing value for money.
King of Kabul: The unnamed white lion is the zoo’s star attraction
Behind the fighters crowded along the fence surrounding its enclosure a zoo official was hopping anxiously from foot to foot. He asked the stone throwers to stop, but was ignored.
‘What can we do?’ he appealed to me. ‘We cannot make them stop. Look at them.’
He meant ‘look at their guns and general demeanour’. He was an educated Afghan with Western sensibilities, they were insurgents from the mountains and backwoods who had been fighting for years. This was their time, not his. At least the height of the fence meant that stones could only be lobbed rather than hurled with force.
The lion chose to ignore them. Kabul Zoo has had a chequered history since it opened in 1967. At its height, it displayed more than 400 animals. But the infrastructure – and staff – were devastated in the civil war of the 1990s.
Most of the animals were killed and the plight of those
