Kuhaylan Hayfi
I just wanted to quickly add to the wonderful blogs on the Kuhaylan Hayfi strain. I learned much by reading them. I just wanted to add that I found it comforting when I visited Syria in 1996 that the Kuyahlan Hayfi strain that came from there via *Reshan is still very much alive. When we were visiting the newly built Al Basel government stud, they introduced a number of their stallions of various strains. One handsome young bay stallion was of the Kuhaylan Hayfi stallion. I got a snap shot of him. It is fairly descriptive and I wanted to share it here. It is not a very sharp image because he was quite far away in a very large paddock and we did not have the opportunity to get in the arena close up. So I set my camera to the max telephoto and offer the image here in web resolution. The sire of this colt was the senior stallion at the time, a handsome grey named Basil. I do not recall getting to see the dam but perhaps someone who sees this blog and is familiar with the breeding at the stud can tell us more about this colts breeding. I believe they said he was 3 or 4 in 1996. Enjoy. Joe.
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Hi Joe: I looked up the bay sons of Basil in DataSource, and there are only two that would have been at least 3 years old in 1996. Majd is out of Mayadah and was bred by the Ministry of Agriculture. The other is named Fares Al Thani, out of Qatheefah, and was bred by Mustafa Al-Jabri. I don’t have the Syrian stud books, so I can’t look up the strains of these mares to see which was K. Hayfi. Since you saw him at the government stud, probably this is Majd?
This is Majd indeed. I saw him as an adult stallion at the Syrian Government Stud. His dam Mayadah was a Kuhaylah Hayfiyah, bred by Salmo al-Hajiz of the Shammar tribe, and acquired by the Syrian Government. Majd died a few months ago of a disease that has already killed 10% of the Syrian Arab horse population.
I am so sorry to hear that Majd died from disease. He was very impressive. I did not get a photo of his dam but his sire was introduced and I have one photo of him. He is Basil, a Kuhaylan Mimrah bred by Mustapha Al Jabri. I will also post a picture of another stallion at Al Basel that really charmed me. His name is Shawal and he is a Shuwayman Sabbah.
I used to race a mare that was the daughter of “Majd”, from Basil Jadaan’s stock; her name was “Salma” she won 2 races and she was sold to a Hama breeder. As for the sickness, it is “dourine” it did not killed 10% of the syrian stock, but 10 to 15 mares died from it and as it is only a sexual transmissible sickness, all the stallions operating in syria were bloodtested and the sick ones are now known and breeders avoid using them.
Good to know that this disease was not exapanding as rapidly as I thought. The figures I was given must have been inflated!