In a remote region of Chad, a single-minded park ranger devises a sting operation to snare Africa’s most elusive ELEPHANT KILLER by Joshua Hammer photographs by Kate Brooks

Imperiled survivors: A herd migrates across Chad, once home to tens of thousands of elephants. After a surge in poaching, only about 1,000 remain.

42 SMITHSONIAN.COM | July • August 2014 unusual.” As he passed over black- “Twenty, thirty animals at a time had was tortured and abused for a week,” ened scrub west of the town of Fi- gone down. It was terrible,” Roberts says Roberts, who even inserted a tube AREA OF DETAIL LIBYA anga, the result of a controlled burn says. The pilot estimated that 120 el- into the baby’s stomach to force-feed to create arable land, Roberts noticed ephants had been killed here; the gov- him. “The emotional condition of an elephant tracks—hundreds of them— ernment would later put the total at 86. elephant like that—it just shuts down.” in the charred soil. He dipped his The sole survivor of the massacre, The elephant, whom he named Max, AFRICA plane lower and followed the tracks Roberts would learn, was a 9-week-old died after ten days in Roberts’ care. to a clearing. It was then that he saw calf, captured by villagers, roped to a CHAD the fi rst pile of bones. tree and taunted day and night by the The Sahel, the vast, arid zone that lies Roberts counted the skeletons of village boys. Roberts tracked down the between the Sahara and the Sudanese between 15 and 20 elephants. The re- location, drove there and loaded the savanna, once supported a population NIGER Lake Chad SUDAN mains were fresh. “You could see the weakened and traumatized orphan of a million elephants. Nineteenth- e l a h moisture in the ground from blood,” into the back of a pickup truck. He then and early 20th-century Western trav- S h e T Zakouma he says. Hungry villagers had already drove several hours to the landing strip elers wrote with amazement about National Park Darfur swarmed over the corpses, stripping where he had parked his Cessna. After the huge herds that roamed the bush, C NIGERIA hari R Am Timan iv r e e r their meat. Even the animals’ skin an all-night vigil, he used a container v and the contests between the great i R mat Fianga ala was gone, taken to fashion gris-gris, of milk to lure the elephant onto his Bouba Ndjida S SOUTH N National Park SUDAN or totems, for animist ceremonies. A plane, fl ew to his mission and tried to Bush pilot Gary Roberts (with Charlie, CENTRAL a rescued monkey) uncovered evidence CAMEROON AFRICAN REPUBLIC few hundred yards from the fi rst site nurse the calf back to health. “He saw 0 200 miles of an elephant massacre during an aerial Roberts came upon a second heap his whole family murdered, then ran survey. “You could see the moisture in of bones—then a third, and a fourth. around looking for his mother, then the ground from blood,” he recalls. he call came in to Gary Roberts last March at his home in Béré, a village of subsis- tence farmers deep in the sorghum and cotton fi elds of southern Chad. Reports were circulating, a local con- servationist told him, that a mass killing of elephants had occurred some 100 miles away, near the Camer- oon border: Could Roberts see what he could fi nd out? Roberts, 36, a Seventh-day Adventist missionary, ex- perienced bush pilot and amateur conservationist who sometimes fl ies research missions for Chad’s wildlife department, climbed into his single-engine, four-seat Cessna. He took off from the mission’s dirt airstrip and headed north toward the border. Roberts cruised for three hours over a vast green carpet—low-lying brush, sorghum fi elds and stands of acacias, broken by an oc- casional dirt road or cattle trail. “I didn’t have any co- ordinates, nobody knew exactly where it was,” recalls the missionary-pilot, who grew up in Congo’s remote North Kivu province, the son of another Adventist mis- sionary, and has spent nearly his entire life in Central Africa. “So I’m fl ying at 500 feet, looking for anything KATE BROOKS / REDUX PICTURES; MAP: STEVE STANKIEWICZ KATE T44 SMITHSONIAN.COM | July • August 2014 July • August 2014 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 45 animals and the Baggara Selem, Suda- nese horsemen who pursued the herds with ten-foot-long spears. “Among the Selem, several are so dexterous that they can bring the elephant down with a single thrust of the lance,” observed Jules Poncet, a French ivory hunter who joined the chase in the 1860s. But sport turned into slaughter in the 1970s, fueled by a proliferation of assault rifl es from the continent’s post-colonial bush wars. A 1989 inter- national ban on ivory tamped down the bloodshed, but China’s growing wealth and insatiable hunger for ivory— carved into brush-holders, boxes, stat- uettes and other intricate pieces—has pushed the numbers back up. Six years ago, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, the United Nations body that regulates the international wildlife trade, declared China an “Approved Ivory Trading State”—allowing a one-time legal sale of ivory from four southern African countries, which at the time had large and healthy elephant populations. The sale to China of 62 tons of ivory from African stockpiles in 2008 reopened the door for a vast illicit market—by making the task of distinguishing legal from illegal ivory next to impossible. In Hong Kong, one of the ivory trade’s main transit points, seized ivory rose from 3.2 tons in 2010 to 7.9 tons in the fi rst ten months of 2013 —the equiva- lent of 1,675 dead elephants. Vietnam, Thailand, Taiwan and the Philippines have also become major purchasers of elephant tusks. In December 2012, Malaysian authorities seized 1,000 elephant tusks hidden in secret com- partments in two shipments of mahog- any from the West African nation of Togo. The 24-ton seizure, worth tens of millions of dollars, is believed to be the largest such haul in history. Now the Sahel has again become a killing ground. A year before the Fianga massacre, in February 2012, Roberts had also been nearby when 100 raiders on horseback had galloped

At the site Roberts discovered, a herd of 86, including pregnant females and calves who had not developed tusks, were shot. “Twenty, thirty animals at

CREDIT TK HERE CREDIT TK HERE a time had gone down,” Roberts says.

46 SMITHSONIAN.COM | July • August 2014 July • August 2014 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 47 out of Chad into Cameroon’s Bouba issued a press release calling Gargaf Herds of buff aloes galloped across a Ndjida National Park, mowing down a “recidivist poacher,” the “master- grassy plain. As we dipped low over between 300 and 600 elephants with mind” of some of the biggest elephant the Salamat River, crocodiles wrig- AK-47s and rocket-propelled gre- slaughters in Chad’s history and “a gled from the sandy banks into the nades. The killers stopped to pray to pivotal player in the international water. Banking right, Labuschagne Allah between barrages of gunfi re and poaching network.” “He was the worst circled over a group of 250 elephants, played a cat-and-mouse game with of the worst,” says Adoum Mahamat the largest assemblage I had ever the Cameroon army for two weeks be- Brahim, a park ranger turned regional seen. They fanned their ears and fore disappearing into the bush. Of the environmental chief who tracked Gar- raised their trunks like snorkels—an 50,000 elephants that roamed Chad gaf and his accomplices. The rise and instinctive response to danger. 50 years ago, barely 2 percent are left. fall of Gargaf sheds light on the com- Gargaf grew up on the park’s north- In the neighboring Central African bustible mix of corruption, despera- eastern border, in Am Timan, a pro- Republic and Cameroon, the popula- tion and globalization that is fueling vincial capital of 75,000 people. It is a tion may be even lower. Poverty, brib- the African poaching explosion. It also sleepy place of herders, cultivators, a ery and insecurity are all contributing refl ects the dedication of a handful of smattering of missionaries, and gov- factors in a region where a single large conservationists, rangers and other ernment offi cials. Beyond the town tusk can sell on the black market for environmental crusaders who are de- lies sparsely inhabited bush, where $6,000—ten times the annual salary of termined to bring the killers down. Gargaf—the son of subsistence farm- a typical worker. Many conservation- ers—roamed in his youth as a guide ists say that if governments don’t do At Zakouma National Park (where pho- for hire, leading livestock across an- more to protect the remaining herds, tographs, below, of rangers murdered cient cattle trails. the last elephants could disappear by poachers are displayed), military In February 2003, just across the commander Abakar Mohamat, left, con- within a generation. fers with park offi cial Adoum Mahamat Sudan border in Darfur, two rebel “What is special about elephants Brahim on anti-poaching eff orts. groups rose up against the Islamist is just how similar they are to us— socially and developmentally,” says Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell, a Stanford ecologist who has written four books “He was very proud of his based on her Namibian fi eld research on elephants. “If you watch a family killing,” says Brahim of Gargaf. group reuniting, their behavior is ex- actly like ours—the little cousins dart- ing off together, the elaborate greet- Hassan Idriss Gargaf’s twisted trail government, accusing it of margin- ings of adults. Elephants off er a way begins at Zakouma National Park, alizing the country’s non-Arab pop- of looking into the mirror, for better or founded in 1963 and today one of the ulation. Sudanese President Omar worse,” she adds. “If we value human Sahel’s last refuges of the elephant. Hassan al-Bashir unleashed Arab rights, we should also value animals Comprising 1,200 square miles in horsemen, known as Janjaweed (a that have the same level of sophistica- remote eastern Chad, about 500 term formed from the Arabic for tion that we do. We should keep those miles from Ndjamena, the park lies “man,” “gun” and “horse”), in a cam- beings with us here on earth.” at the convergence zone where the paign of ethnic cleansing against the sandy wastes of the Sahara give way rebels and their civilian supporters. Last June, the government of Chad to savanna and tropical rainforest. The Janjaweed raped, tortured and declared a signifi cant victory in its of- For fi ve months a year, rainfall sub- killed thousands and displaced two ten-faltering attempts to save its most merges most of the park. During the million, including 200,000 now in endangered species. The Mobile Bri- dry season, the residual rain collects displaced persons’ centers and ref- gade for Environmental Protection, in a handful of channels and hun- ugee camps in Chad. The Janjaweed directly under the control of President dreds of muddy pans, which sustain fi nanced their operations partly by Idriss Déby Itno, captured the alleged a vast population of birds and wild- poaching elephants in Zakouma, a mastermind of the March 2013 kill- life. “In the rainy season all this is just one-week ride from Darfur. The AK- ings at Fianga and many other mas- one big wetland,” park manager Rian 47-wielding horsemen—some direct sacres. Hassan Idriss Gargaf, 38, was Labuschagne told me, as we fl ew in descendants of the Baggara Selem— said to command a gang of gunmen his Cessna last December over thick shot dead dozens of elephants every who rampaged across the Sahel over riverine bush and acacia-speckled month in and around the park, sawing the last few years, growing wealthy savanna. The landscape was still vi- off the tusks and leaving corpses to from the sale of ivory and leaving a brantly green a month after the last rot on roads and in the bush. trail of dead elephants in its wake. rain. Lotuses clogged milky channels, Chad’s government was preoccu-

Chad’s minister of the environment CREDIT TK HERE and ponds glinted silver in the sun. pied with a homegrown insurgency;

48 SMITHSONIAN.COM | July • August 2014 July • August 2014 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 49 At Zakouma head- quarters, a heavily guarded storeroom off ers mute testimony to the carnage: a char- nel house of elephant tusks and skeletons held as evidence.

SMITHSONIAN.COM 51 the park manager at the time, a Eu- because this was our national patri- meeting, and the commander of the South African nonprofi t organization. to facilitate patrols during the rainy Weeks after his arrest, Gargaf, too, ropean company contracted by the mony,” the 38-year-old recalled at the Mobile Brigade provided Brahim with Rian and Lorna Labuschagne, conser- season, when Zakouma becomes im- escaped from custody—walking out European Union, was ineff ective; cor- park headquarters, a turreted stucco a safe house and weapons. Gargaf ar- vationists with decades of experience passable by road. They darted and col- unchallenged from the military bar- rupt park guards tipped off poachers building that resembled a French for- rived in Ndjamena that evening. As he in Malawi and Tanzania, were brought lared elephants to keep better track of racks in Ndjamena. “He came and about the whereabouts of elephants eign-legion fort. “Even if there was a inspected the weaponry, the poacher in to protect the dwindling herd. their movements. The Labuschagnes went, he was well taken care of. One and patrols. In 2008, the head of an- single elephant left in Zakouma, we bragged about killing 26 elephants in The Labuschagnes encountered changed patrol positions daily and day he didn’t come back,” Brahim says ti-poaching at Zakouma was fi red for have the duty to protect it.” Brahim’s a single day at Zakouma in 2010, and ubiquitous evidence of slaughter and didn’t tell rangers where they were with disgust. Now he was back in op- selling weapons to the killers. In six dedication, say observers, was a rare about a string of other crimes. “He was traumatized survivors. “You found car- going until a few hours before they eration along the Chari River fl owing years, the elephant population at Zak- quality in a fi eld where the main mo- very proud of his killing,” said Bra- casses all over the park when we came were deployed. “This eliminated the through farmland south of Ndjamena. ouma plunged from 4,000 to 450. tivation factor is a desire to escape him.“Gargaf told me that he knew the here. It was just a killing fi eld,” Rian, chance of information going out to There were no game wardens or sanc- Gargaf had learned the migratory from grinding poverty. “Few of the [Zakouma] region very well, and when the grandson of an Afrikaner mission- the wrong people,” Rian said. tuaries in this more fertile, populous routes of elephants from his cattle guards give a rip if these elephants he realized how profi table [poaching] ary in Malawi, told me, as we sat on The poachers struck back hard. corner of the country, but there were drives, and when Sudanese poachers live or die—if you took away their sal- could be, he got deeper into it, and the terrace of Zakouma’s guest lodge In August 2012, at the height of the about 200 elephants. Subsistence approached him with an off er to serve aries tomorrow they’d stop working,” he found ivory buyers and guns and beside the Tinga River at dusk, sipping rainy season—when some elephants farmers, angered by beasts trampling as their guide, he leapt at the opportu- says one wildlife consultant in Chad played a bigger and bigger role.” Castel beers while baboons frolicked leave their sanctuary and follow an- their crops, were often happy to col- nity. Gargaf had fathered seven chil- who didn’t want to be identifi ed. Bra- At 10 o’clock that evening, Mobile in the mango trees. All 450 survivors cient migratory routes—Sudanese laborate with poachers. Gargaf and dren with two wives, and he might him is one of those rare guards, says Brigade troops surrounded the house had concentrated into a single group, a poachers killed six elephants near his gang murdered 63 elephants in well have felt fi nancial pressure from Rian Labuschagne, who are driven by and took Gargaf into custody. Gargaf behavior apparently inculcated during Heban, 60 miles north of the park. A August 2012 along the Chari and 40 his family responsibilities. Eventually, a passion for Chad’s endangered wild- was imprisoned in a military com- the 19th-century spear-hunting days, ranger squad from Zakouma discov- elephants along the Chad-Cameroon Gargaf teamed up with another pasto- life and a strict code of ethics. pound in Ndjamena. As a reward for when bunching together made it ered the poachers’ deserted camp and border in an attack in which fi ve Cam- ralist from Am Timan, Yaya Hassap. Brahim began cultivating infor- his work, the government promoted harder for the Baggara Selem to isolate seized satellite phones, solar panels, eroonian forestry agents died. In 2007, the pair allegedly led Suda- mants in nearby villages, trading Brahim to chief environmental offi - the weak. But now the animals’ behav- medicine, food, 1,000 rounds of am- The Cameroon army captured the nese poachers into Zakouma, where small gifts for tips. “Little by little we cer in the Salamat region around Zak- ior was accelerating their destruction. munition and Sudanese military ID poacher again in 2012. Gargaf again they shot dead two guards, killed 13 recovered arms, we got information,” ouma, an honor for a poor park ranger “It made it easier for poachers to shoot cards. Three weeks later, the poach- got away. A few months later came the elephants and destroyed several ve- he said. In 2010 he began hearing one who had never gone to college. “These them,” said Rian. One of the fi rst things ers crept up on six rangers in the mid- massacre of the 86 elephants near Fi- hicles. Eventually the two partners name over and over: Yaya Hassap. jobs are almost never given to some- they noticed was an absence of calves. dle of dawn prayers and shot them all anga. Brahim traced Gargaf to a new in crime began their own poaching “I learned that every poacher who one without an education,” says La- “They had stopped breeding because dead. “The cook survived and told the base in Goré, in southernmost Chad, network—purchasing weapons, orga- comes to this region passes through beside the Central African Republic nizing logistics and fi nding a regular Yaya,” said Brahim, who began a border. “I told my informant there, buyer of tusks in Ndjamena, a mer- search for the elusive fi gure. “He con- ‘If it’s day or night, it doesn’t matter, chant known as Mahmadou. trolled a huge network.” On and on came the herd of if you see Gargaf returning home, you One day Brahim received a call on call me,’” Brahim said. Then, last June Adoum Mahamat Brahim, the gaunt, his cellphone from a number he didn’t elephants, an unbroken line 14—hours after the informant tipped soft-spoken wildlife expert from Am recognize. “I said ‘Who is this?’ The off Brahim that Gargaf was back—a Timan, had always dreamed of work- person answered, ‘Yaya.’ I said, ‘Yaya?’ Mobile Brigade force broke down the ing at Zakouma. As a boy in the bush, I wondered why he was calling me.” of power and majesty. door of Gargaf’s house and placed him he became fascinated by elephant Hassap informed Brahim that he under arrest. Interrogated after his behavior and began doing volunteer knew the ranger was hunting for him When conservationist Rian Labus- of the constant shooting at them, the story,” said Rian. “We got there three capture, Gargaf maintained that he patrols on horseback around the and requested a meeting. In a teashop chagne (surveying the park by air) ar- stress, like humans in a war situation,” days later and found their bodies.” was just a small-timer. “I’m not hiding rived at Zakouma in 2010, he found that park as a teenager. The park put him in a bazaar near Am Timan, Hassap the refuge had become “a killing fi eld.” Rian said. The elephants panicked Sudanese troops captured one of anything,” he told his interlocutors. on staff in 1998, at age 22, the same told Brahim about his partnership at the sight of horses, the poachers’ the attackers and turned him over to “I’m a cattle trader . . . hired by poach- year that two rangers were killed in with Gargaf. The relationship had be- buschagne. “But Adoum has the heart main means of transport. Early on, Chadian authorities, who locked him ers to guide them in their operations, an early battle with poachers. Bra- come strained, he said, because Gargaf and the guts to do it.” Thanks to one an elephant bull charged a ranger on up in Am Timan prison. But the war- for which they off ered me one million him watched, horrifi ed, as carnage had been cheating him on his share of man’s initiative, it seemed—at least horseback when he felt threatened; den allegedly smuggled in weapons in francs [$2,500]. It was a proposition swept the park, and as men he had be- ivory profi ts. “Yaya was very discon- for the moment—that Chad’s govern- the horse bolted and threw off its rider, exchange for a bribe, and in August that I found much easier than trading friended lost their lives in the escalat- tent,” says Brahim. Hassap made an ment had achieved a victory. who was projected headfi rst into a tree 2013, twenty-six prisoners, including cattle.” Gargaf admitted only to help- ing violence. (A total of 19 park rang- off er: He would lead Brahim to his ac- trunk. He later died. the Sudanese poacher, broke out and ing his group kill ten elephants around ers and four military offi cers have complice in exchange for a job in the At Zakouma National Park, where The Labuschagnes fired guards disappeared. “He murdered six of our the Chari River, “and after they dis- been killed at Zakouma since 1998.) park service. The ranger, with the ap- Gargaf, Hassap and their Sudanese suspected of taking bribes, spent guards and he just walked free,” Ba- persed, I went back to herding cattle.” Almost every day he would encounter proval of higher-ups, agreed. gangs had cut a swath of destruction $100,000 on radios and GPS devices, bakar Matar Breme, Zakouma’s assis- the corpses of elephants on the main Posing as an ivory buyer and arms for years, there were similar signs of a and set up solar-powered systems tant park manager, told me bitterly. A few months after Gargaf’s third road—shot down by poachers when merchant, Brahim telephoned Gargaf turnaround. In 2010, the park’s Euro- and repeaters for the park’s radio net- Casting a glance at framed photos of arrest, I joined Rian and Lorna La- they emerged from the bush. in March 2011. He had AK-47s, M-14 pean Union benefactors, dismayed by work. They built ten airstrips on the the six dead rangers on the wall of buschagne on a game drive through Though well armed, the guards semiautomatics and 3,000 rounds of the carnage, threatened to withdraw periphery of the park and converted park headquarters, Brahim told me, Zakouma to observe the progress they lacked radios and had established ammunition for sale. Would he be will- all their fi nancing if Chad’s govern- two old ones inside Zakouma into all- “There is no justice in Am Timan. had made in stabilizing the onetime no intelligence networks. “I was de- ing to come to Ndjamena to inspect ment didn’t bring in a qualifi ed man- weather airstrips. They set up trailers People there are always ready to take war zone. At midday, the best time for moralized, but I had to keep working the merchandise? Gargaf agreed to a ager. They turned to African Parks, a stocked with food and other supplies money and let the poachers escape.” observing elephants in the wild, we

52 SMITHSONIAN.COM | July • August 2014 July • August 2014 | SMITHSONIAN.COM 53 was loud a foot infront ofus. Butthesignal of ten-foot-high stalks, unabletosee grass. Soonwe were lostinajungle louder,” Lornasaidexcitedly. swung closetoourheads. “It’s getting Cruiser, andneedle-studdedbranches bent andbroke beneaththeLand into athicket. Slenderacacia trunks right,” shesaid.Rianplungedthe4x4 faint signal.“Theymustbethere, toour inthetruckbed,pickedLorna, upa continued tocircle above us. Then still nosignsofelephants. TheCessna plowed on through thebush. about thepark’s radio equipmentand He madeafew disparaging remarks manager was growing frustrated. French. Hegotnoresponse. Thepark he intoned,inAfrikaans-accented ters. “ through theradio room atheadquar- tempted communicating withhim ferent radio frequency. Hethenat- raise buthewas thepilot, onadif- just aheadofus. antelopes disappeared intothefoliage and seyal acacias. Buff gotiated around standsoftamarinds able swamp duringtherains, andne- over afi the beastsfrom theair. We bounced cled above, tryingtohelpusbyspotting savanna, asingle-engineCessna cir- we turnedoff ing from several collared animals. As that would homeinonsignalsemanat- GPS systemandahand-heldbeacon laden withicechestsfullofwater, a climbed intoaroofl Lorna proclaimed. glimpsed amassive bull. “Elephants!” and then,through theseaofyellow, I in thereeds, caught aglimpseofgray, fl 54 rustling, munching andjostlingof alive with soundandmovement—the ing nottoalarm them.Thebushcame moved carefully through thegrass, try- Ifollowedon foot. right behindhim.We ash ofmovement. Iheard arustle We entered afi The heatwas fi Rian, atthewheel,triedfutilelyto Rian pulledthecar over andadvanced

SMITHSONIAN.COM La basela eldofdriedmud,animpass- Smithsonian.com/poacher to saveChad’s elephants at Get acloser lookattheeff now—and upahead, theroad ontotrackless erce, andthere were eld oftallelephant ess LandCruiser, July •August2014 | aloes and small aloes andsmall I saw a orts ?” more than sixtonsof confiscated 2014, Chineseauthorities destroyed black-market ivory trade: InJanuary down bygovernments against the ful signfor themis a wideningcrack- that numberin adecade. Onehope- stays oncourse, theycouldachieve encounter. exhilaratedlight, byourhour-long back toheadquarters inthefading 1,000 elephants,” hesaid,aswe drove say ouraimistogetZakouma backto of peaceatZakouma indecades. “We sign ofstability—the longestperiod later tellme,anotherencouraging 21 borninthelastyear, Lorna would ing behinditsmother. Itwas oneof citedly, pointingtoaninfant shelter- line ofpower andmajesty. on came the elephants, anunbroken single lineacross thesavanna. Onand herd. Thehugeprocession moved ina had anunobstructedviewoftheentire followed themtoaclearing,where we and ploddedoff ance, thenturnedawkwardly around raised histrunkinagesture ofannoy- turned toface us, fanned hisears and the pooldry. Amud-covered teenager crowded around, splashedandsucked at aplayground water fountain— mals—like children jostlingfor space pan. RianandIhungbackastheani- ing through thegrass toward amuddy were simplysaying hello. ephants hadjustcrossed paths—and he whispered, thattwo groups ofel- motioned for metostay. He guessed, us toretreat? Rianshookhisheadand the cacophony meantasawarning for purr. Ifroze, unsure whattodo. Was by astrange, low vibrato—an elephant ens ofelephantswere accompanied of trum the herd, thebusheruptedinachorus Then, aswe gottowithin25yards of her 2-year-old, amassive alphamale. aprotective ing adolescent, motherand could make outindividuals—afrolick- obscured behindtheveil ofgrass, butI vantage Theywere point. stillmostly satisfaction, maneuvering for abetter the largestgroup, Rianwhispered in 250 elephants. We hadcomeacross The Labuschagnesguessthat ifall “Look, there’s acalf,” Riansaidex- The group moved enmasse,march- pets. Theblaringhornsofdoz- to join hiskin.We would beanoutrage.” sense for metocontinue inthisjob. It headquarters, “itdoesn’t make any comrades infront of Zakouma park Brahim toldme,ashe stoodwithhis ago? “If Gargaf hasescaped again,” ered neartheCameroon border ayear the scale thatGaryRoberts discov- poised again to unleashcarnage on thicket ofacacias, Brahim’s nemesis at thisvery moment lyinginwait ina ings? Orishe,asskeptics maintain, of healthcare, andextrajudicial kill- food andwater, poorsanitation,lack tional report for overcrowding, fi cited ina2012AmnestyInterna- fortress surrounded bybarbed wire, Korotoro Prison,anotoriousSaharan Chadian offi diffi master poacher’s whereabouts are gation intotheirrole inthefraud. been suspendedpendinganinvesti- Otherguardshim indisgust. have just played agame withus,” saidBra- currently injailawaiting trial.“He Fired from hisjobasaranger, heis using hisbrother toplay thecorpse. faked theraid andstagedthephoto, But itsoonemergedthatHassap had collected $10,000 inreward money. of apoacherkilledintheattack, and brought backaphotoofthecorpse of weapons andivory. Hassap even a poachers’ camp thatnetted atrove nal-turned-guard, hadledaraid on near thepark,Hassap, thecrimi- After three elephants were killed have achieved anotherbigsuccess. therangerouma, staff Some timebefore my arrival atZak- ten hard totelljustwhoiswinning. poaching goeson—thoughitisof- River, meanwhile, thebattle against the United StatesinNovember 2013. the destructionofsixtonsivory in the fi smuggling. ThedestructionbyChina, of Guangdong, acenterfor ivory guan, acityinthesouthernprovince ivory ornamentsandtusksinDong- killed insidetheparkintwoyears. results: Notasingleelephanthasbeen across Zakouma has achieved dramatic A heroic andaggressive campaign As for Hassan IdrissGargaf, the At Zakouma andalongtheChari cult toascertain.Ishe,assome rst ever bythatcountry, follows cials insist, lockedcials insist, inside appeared to lthy

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