Another photo of Dahess, the Ubayyan Suhayli stallion

Dahess (Awaad x Al-Jazi by the Ubayyan of ‘Atnan al-Shazi) was a 1987 grey stallion. He was bred by sayyid Muhammad al-Shaykh Salim a Tufayhi, a non-Bedouin from a family of religious notables in Upper Mesopotamia, as so was his dam. He was a ‘Ubayyan Sharrak by strain, tracing to the marbat of ‘Awwad ‘Azzam al-Sahlan, or ‘Ubayyan Suhayli.

He was sired by the grey Kuhaylan al-Krush stallion Awaad, who hails from the famed marbat of Mayzar al-‘Abd al-Muhsin al-Jarba, and as such he is a half brother to the black stallion Mokhtar now in France.

His dam, al-Jazi, was reportedly one of the prettiest mares in Syria, and eventually came to be owned by the late Basil al-Asad, brother to the current president of the Syrian Arab Republic. Dahess was sold as a youngster to the former Qatari consul in Damascus, the late Yusuf al-Rumaihi, who owned a wonderful collection of beautiful and well-authenticated desert-bred mares (more on this later), as well as the two Egyptian stallions Okaz (Wahag x Nazeemah) and al-Qahir (Ikhnatoon x Marium).  

When Rumaihi passed away, the horses were dispersed and some of them found their way to Qatar, where they were overlooked and eventually given away. Dahess then entered a brief racing career, which took him to Lebanon, where my father and I saw him and bought him on the spot. He was 8. He then spent a year training at the Beirut racetrack, before Radwan Shabareq sent his old mentor ‘Abd al-Qadir Hammami to look at the horse with a view of using him as a herd stallion, which I thought he deserved to be. We quickly agreed to exchange Dahess for a Kuhaylat al-Krush filly of Radwan’s breeding: ‘Amshet Shammar (Al-Aawar x Ghallaiah, by the black Saqlawi Marzaqani of Al-‘Anud, the daughter of the Sheykh of Tay).

Dahess covered most of the mares at Radwan and several others at Mustafa Jabri, in Aleppo. One day he got loose, started galloping the paddock where the photo below was taken, bred a mare, and fell dead of a heart attack just after. He was so classy and masculine (as the photo below shows), yet as sweet and soft as sheep (as you can tell from the other photo I posted earlier.