Why does Morocco kill thousands of stray dogs before the World Cup 2030? – WTOP News

For Amina, a 19 -year -old girl from Ifrane, a small mountain town that is known as the “Switzerland of Morocco”, seeing dead dogs is common. Amina asked CNN to use a pseudonym for fear of reprisals from the Moroccan authorities.

“Walking to school, he passed pee blood on the street,” he remembered in an interview with CNN. “At a certain point I realized that it was not normal to start the day with avoiding corpses.”

According to Amina, the murders are mainly intensified in the past year. “In the past there were occasional shootings every few months,” he said. “Now they are more systematically. They kill dogs as if it were a sport, as if people were chasing ducks.”

Animal protection groups claim that the murders are part of a campaign to ‘clean’ the streets of Morocco earlier FIFA 2030 Worldthat the country will began to do with Spain and Portugal, while Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina Each will house an inaugural party.

“People armed with guns take to the streets, often at night, and shoot the dogs,” said CNN Les Ward, director of the International Coalition for the Protection of Animal Welfare (IAWPC). “They gather others and take them to the municipal pharmacies where they are poisoned. They just disappear.”

Omar Jaïd, president of the Provincial Council of Tourism of IFRane, told CNN that the city “started the streets of street dogs, as part of our preparations for the FIFA World Cup 2030.” IFRane is approximately 64 kilometers from the FEZ stadium, one of the Annexes proposed for the tournament, Which is expected to receive countless national teams and thousands of visitors.

Jaïd added that animals are collected and transferred to pharmacies where they can be vaccinated. He emphasized that he is a ‘dog lover’.

Amina, however, witnessed something else.

In the night of February 9, 2024, he woke up with the sound of Schoten. During the departure he discovered three dead dogs in a garbage can. One of them was a male Husky who was aware of the neighborhood.

“It was terrified,” he remembered. “I took Husky out of the garbage bin, covered with blood. I didn’t know what to do. I felt so helpless.”

CNN cannot independently confirm who has killed dogs. CNN contacted the municipality of iFrane for comments, but received no answer.

“Street dogs pose a serious risk to public health, especially as carriers of rabies,” said Mohammed Roudani, head of the public health division and green spaces of the Ministry of the Interior of Morocco. “Every year around 100,000 people are bitten; 40 % of them are children under the age of 15.”

In 2019, the Moroccan government introduced the Capture-SteriLization-Agunation-Liberation (CEVL) program, a humanitarian strategy to control the population of street dogs. “We work together with local authorities to implement it in accordance with the standards for animal welfare,” said Roudani.

However, there is a major obstacle: municipalities, not the national government, are responsible for the management of street animals. “There is a legal vacuum,” Roudani explained. “Some cities are still dependent on traditional methods and currently there is no law that prohibits killing street dogs.”

In some cities, stray dogs are poisoned with Strychnine, a pesticide forbidden in many countries for causing inhuman suffering. “We have to tackle the problem in a different way,” said Roudani. “No more murders. Not stricter. We need an ethical solution.”

CNN has verified images of dog murders in cities such as Marrakech, Casablanca, Agadir and IFRane. Filmed videos recently showed in May 2025 that dogs are immobilized with metal cables and are thrown in trucks full of corpses.

And it’s not just the animals that are in danger.

On January 24 Abderrahim Sounni, a barista in the city of Ben Ahmed, was just finished with his turn when a street dog ran next to him, continued by a car.

Shots and three bullets were heard, the dog did not reach, but influenced the knee and the thigh of Sounni. The 34 -year -old man told the incident in an interview with a local medium and later confirmed the details in a call with CNN.

Soundi did not believe that the attacker had seen it, but was concentrated in the dog. As you ask for help, bleeding on the sidewalk, the vehicle left at full speed.

The passers -by found him and was urgently transferred to a hospital in Casablanca, where doctors could not extract the bullets. He said that the police later told him that the municipality’s vehicle was.

CNN contacted the local police, who did not comment on the incident. Soundi refused to make more comments to CNN and said he felt overwhelmed by media attention.

“He has reached the point where people are in danger,” Ward, President of IAWPC, told CNN. “There can be no shootings on the street, especially during a world cup with thousands of tourists.”

In February of this year, a coalition of 10 animal rights groups encouraged FIFA to tackle the “increase in conquest and sacrifice” of stray dogs in Morocco before the World Cup 2030.

In a letter addressed to the Secretary General of FIFA, the conservationist Jane Goodall said that he was “absolutely shocked” to see the Moroccan government “dedicated to big murders on street dogs as part of a clear attempt to make the FIFA World Cup headquarters more ‘presentable’ for foreign visitors.

FIFA did not respond to the letter, but said in a statement to CNN that the candidacy of Morocco “described its commitment to the protection of animal rights, including the expansion of” clinics and support programs for street dogs. “

“FIFA follows its local counterparts with the aim of ensuring that the obligations are fulfilled,” said the statement.

As international control increases, dog hunters seem to have become more discreet, especially in tourist centers such as Marrakech.

Jane Wilson and Louise Jackson – two British residents who live in Marrakech – told CNN that the Vans openly showed cages at the rear with living dogs and death in sight last year. Now white vans without traces patrol in silence through the streets, who conquered street animals, they said.

In Casablanca, vans to conquer the Casa Baia logo, a municipal development company, animals. Ownership of the municipalityThe website of the company He states that his “expert teams are permanently mobilized” to capture and retain more than ” 20,000 street dogs per year.

CNN rated images prepared by an animal rights group that shows that dogs are dragged to vehicles from Casa Baia with metal chains. Smaller dogs are caught in fish nets, their bodies struggle fear before they are thrown into white vans.

Erin Captain, originally from Indiana, moved with her husband to Casablanca last year and soon loved local street dogs. “They are incredible beings,” he said. “I started to take care of two puppies: I vaccinated them, I fed them, I saw them grow.”

Then the neighborhood dogs began to disappear one by one. Captain told CNN that Casa Baia’s buses were walking through the streets day and night. One night, he says, they came for their puppies.

“They were taken out of our house to kick,” he remembered. “The legs were broken; the other was killed in the stairs. It was a nightmare; he was terrified. My husband had to intervene before she left.”

Captain paid for months to vaccinate as many dogs as possible. “But the prisoners came and killed them,” he said. “It’s brutal than you can imagine. I don’t sleep anymore.”

Contact by CNN refused to give a spokesperson for Casa Baia comments on the accusations of killing street dogs or the use of inhuman methods to catch them.

FIFA is aware of the Morocco Matanza in Morocco, at least since 2023. In March of that year, the European Link Coalition (ELC) met an NGO with headquarters in the UK, Senior FIFA officials to present tests of the Matanzas before the 2030 World Cup. The material included dozens of photos, videos and testimonies of witnesses, some refer home directly.

In April 2024, FIFA Human Rights Advisor, Marta Piazza, told the ELC that the organization “appreciated” its contribution and in contact with the Moroccan government to “guarantee coordination with the requirements of the FIFA candidature”, the list of expected services and standards of a host country.

A “next strategy” was promised in the coming weeks.

According to the ELC, FIFA then kept silent. The organization says that it has not heard of Piazza or his colleagues since then. In response to CNN’s request, FIFA said that “it is in contact with animal welfare organizations about this important issue.”

The Moroccan government is taking measures to regulate dog murder practices.

Last month, Roudani and his colleagues presented a bill for which municipalities should stop killing street animals and implementing TNVR programs.

In a statement to CNN, FIFA said that contact with the Moroccan football federation and “confirmation received that various measures have been implemented in the past 5 years”, with new legislation in the process of balancing public health and animal welfare.

The theme attracts attention at the world level before the World Cup 2030, with celebrities such as Ricky Gervais and Peter Egan condemn the murders in which they qualified as “Bleeding”.

“Football fans all over the world love dogs,” said Minky, from Human Rights Watch, CNN. “Animal abuse can become a major problem of public relations if FIFA does not take concrete measures.”

“It’s not just a matter of animal abuse,” added Nick McGeehan, co -director of the Firesquare Rights Group. “Having clear knowledge of problems and choosing to ignore them is a violation of the fundamental human decency.”

The CNN-Wire
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