I checked this out once the Americans invaded Iraq we discovered that Uday one of Saddam's sons had like a zoo like a personal zoo

Yeah, so in the chaos of the invasion all these animals got loose

And so one of the military's jobs was to go around and capture recapture

You know bats and gerbals and cheetahs and shit eventually they managed to get most of them

They're really big or dangerous ones

But there were still some animals that had managed to tuck themselves away inside of the green zone and a lot of them were kittens

So the American occupation staff ended up coming across a lot of these little cute baby kittens

And so they started to name them and play with them and you know basically adopt them and they would get them

Little treats from the commissary and just make a little nice home for them in their trailer or whatever

But then when Haliburton managers discovered the pets in their midst

They asked the Marines guarding the palace to shoot the cats on site

Then you had marine death squads on the hunt for little kittens all across the green zone and Baghdad

You may call them kitty contras. You make feline philangists. That's all that's all

That's good the horrified American occupation staffers started to hide that the kiddies

You know giving them a asylum, but from the book about the green zone here

The Haliburton cat killers finally got wise to the asylum strategy and deployed Filipino contract workers on a hunt and kill mission

They opened up every trailer while the occupants were at work and rounded up every cat they found

So and that's just how they treated the cats

Welcome to blowback a podcast about the Iraq war I'm Brendan James and I'm Noah Coleman and this is episode six

Which we're calling year zero we've now reached the point in our story where America has invaded Iraq and

This episode will look at the first year of American occupation which much like the concept of year zero

Under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 70s

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