The Basra badgers

Basra, summer 2007. About 5,500 British troops were stationed in the city. Their main base sat at Basra airport. The city was in the middle of a militia turf war, and to the north, marshlands drained under Saddam Hussein were being flooded again.

Suad Hassan, a 30-year-old housewife, was asleep one night. "I was sleeping when this strange animal hit me on my head. My husband hurried to shoot it but it was as swift as a deer." Her description was simple: "It is the size of a dog but his head is like a monkey. It runs so quickly."

In Abu Sakhar, north of Basra, the farmer Sattar Jabbar, 50, saw worse. "I saw it at night attacking animals. It even ate a cow. It tore the cow up piece by piece."

Cell-phone videos began circulating in the city. They were said to show "a stocky skunk-like animal with long front claws stalking the streets". Farmers caught and killed several of the animals. No one published a count.

The animals became giant, bear-like and man-eating, and faster than a deer. They had appeared near the British base at Basra airport. In Karmat Ali, the farmer Ali Mohsen said the animal came after a British raid on the area, and that the British had probably released it. AFP put the story out on 11 July 2007. Within days the Telegraph, the Times, the BBC, Channel 4 and ABC had carried it.

Mushtaq Abdul-Mahdi, director of Basra veterinary hospital, inspected the dead animals. They were a native species known locally as al-Girta, in Iraq for decades. "Talk that this animal was brought by the British forces is incorrect and unscientific."

The British Army answered too. Maj. David Gell said the animals were thought to be a kind of honey badger, native to the region but rare in Iraq, nocturnal and not usually dangerous unless provoked. They did not stalk humans or carry them off to their lair. "We have not released giant badgers in Basra." Gell also denied rumours of serpents released into the Shatt al-Arab river.

Maj. Mike Shearer was blunter. "We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." Shearer even mentioned a badger sighting on the base itself. It was a joke. A squadron of 2 Royal Tank Regiment goes by the "Badgers".

Honey badgers, or ratels, are far smaller than the rumour allowed, up to about 14 kg according to AFP. Dr Ghazi Yaqub Azzam, deputy dean of the Basra veterinary college, thought the re-flooding of the marshes was pushing them toward the city. "It doesn't attack man unless threatened." John Burgess, commenting on the Outside the Beltway blog, saw psychological warfare: opponents of the British presence spreading the rumour on purpose, needing only "the lightest link to truth". Nothing independently confirmed Hassan's injury or Jabbar's cow.

Western bloggers mostly treated the Basra badgers as a joke. Opinio Juris asked whether man-eating badgers count as WMD. That same month, Iran reported 14 squirrels "arrested" for carrying foreign spy gear, and commentators set the two stories side by side. No photograph of the Basra animals has surfaced, and the videos have not been located. What remains are two named witnesses, carcasses nobody counted, and a war in which even the wildlife fell under suspicion.