Nowzad

She was just an ordinary brown mutt, a stray, but Pvt. Conrad Lewis loved her.

Lewis, a British paratrooper in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, adopted the dog and named her Pegasus. Everyone called her Peg.

In his letters home, Lewis described Peg as a member of his military family: “I have taught her to sit and give me her paw…. She patrols with us, she is not afraid of the Taliban or their bullets.”

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Virginia Marine Shaun Duling recently returned home to the U.S. from a year-long deployment in Afghanistan with a broken heart and a worn-in dog collar that belonged to a friend he was forced to leave behind — and that he feared he would never see again.

The collar belonged to Bolt, a stray dog that became Duling’s closest companion during a long and lonely winter in Afghanistan. When Duling left the country last month to return home to Alexandria, Virginia, Duling and Bolt had become inseparable, making Duling’s homecoming painfully bittersweet.

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Last summer, Sarah Zeller of Damariscotta, Maine, was living in Kabul, Afghanistan, working for a non-profit. One morning in June, she took an early morning stroll around the compound where she was based. That’s when she first saw a scruffy sheepdog mix the residents nicknamed “Mari.” She was hanging out with the group of stray dogs that lived in the compound. But Zeller says there was something about Mari that set her apart from the rest of the pack.

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TOPSHAM — Susan Chadima’s life as a veterinarian includes her practice on quiet Foreside Road and on war-torn streets in Afghanistan.

Chadima, who founded the Androscoggin Animal Hospital in 1985, will talk about her experiences at the Topsham Public Library at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 15.

With her will be Pen Farthing, a former United Kingdom royal marine who founded Nowzad Dogs, a nonprofit organization that rescues stray and abandoned dogs, cats and donkeys in Afghanistan. The group rehabilitates those animals and locates them new homes in safe places around the globe.

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t’s a year since Bin Laden’s death so you can be forgiven for forgetting about one of the combatants.  However, as President Obama basked in the reflected glory of SEAL Team 6 the spotlight had already fallen firmly on one unlikely team member, a certain four-legged warrior called  Cairo, a Belgian Malinois dog.

The mighty mutt eventually met the US president who said later in a campaign video ‘It wasn’t until I knew that they were across the border, they were safe, everybody was accounted for including the dog,  that, you know, i allowed some satisfaction.’

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Watch this great video of Pen at the Nowzad shelter in May 2012

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Spot made the clandestine journey from the Afghan Taliban stronghold of Helmand to the capital Kabul, where he is undergoing medical treatment before moving to the United States to live with the family of the Marine who rescued him.

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In 2006, while serving as a Royal Marine Commando in Helmand Province, Sergeant Pen Farthing encountered a battle just outside their operating base of Nowzad. It wasn’t a typical show of combat between men; this was a rough and brutal organised dog fight. Pen stepped in without hesitation to end the vicious display, completely unaware how this action would change his life.

Saved from the brutal bloodbath, one of the dogs, a mangy mongrel with a docked ear, immediately adopted Pen, faithfully following the Sergeant everywhere. They became best buddies and inseparable friends. So strong was their bond that Pen set in motion the necessary procedures to bring his new pal ‘Nowzad’ back home to the West Country of England. After saving one animal, Pen was determined to save more. And thus Nowzad Dogs, a not for profit charity, was born.

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Nowzad, a charity set up to relieve the suffering of stray and abandoned dogs, cats, and other animals in Afghanistan and Iraq is the only animal welfare organization in Afghanistan, and the only hope for the dogs and cats in the country.

NOWZAD issued an urgent plea for help Thursday explaining that he group has been told by local authorities that they must either buy the land where their shelter is located in Afghanistan or give up their mission.

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