From the collection of his grandson and namesake Ahmed Ibish, Jr, who writes: These are some photos of winning horses of Ahmed Ibish, you can identify them with the previous photos, by horse shapes and numbers. It’s a pity no names preserved. I can only recollect my father describing how some of his father’s horses “took the Primo.” As to the racing track I can not be sure, is it that of Beirut or Alexandria? No clue. Mostly Beirut, simply because it could not be practical for him to transport his stallions all the way to Alexandria for the sheer purpose of racing. He used to go there for rather selling some of them, and given his old age in the photos I do not think he would have taken the burden. I only can remember how my father spoke of the exquisite method of training and weight loss (Tadhmeer) Ibish used to apply on his horses. He also said that he was a stern man who would not utter a single word about these secret methods. But in general he was close to the Bedouin tribes of the Syrian desert, hence he learned most of his techniques.
Back in 2001, I had put forward the hypothesis that a Saqlawi Sh’aifi stallion bred by a Bedouin of the Sb’aah tribe, and sold to Egypt by Ahmad Ibish was the same horse as Aiglon, the sire of the Egyptian mare *Exochorda (Leila II). I also wrote to Miss Ott about it. I had used information contained in the hujjah of the stallion known in Lebanon as Krush Halba (b. 1921) and in Turkey as Kuru, who was a son of this Saqlawi Sh’aifi, to formulate this hypothesis. This hujjah can be found here (scroll down to approx. the middle of the page). I was wrong. My hypothesis was based on the common ownership of these two horses by Ahmad Ibish, but the dates don’t match, so the two horses cannot possibly be one and the same. Kuru was born in the Syrian desert in 1921, so that Saqlawi Sh’aifi must have bred his dam in 1920, in the desert too, as the analysis of the hujjah suggest. Meanwhile, in 1920/21, the stallion Aiglon was in Egypt, where he sired the mare Exchorda who was born in 1922. I am sorry it took me so long to correct this, but I confess I had completely forgotten about…
My research project about Syrian horse-racer Ahmad Ibish is progressing well, but I am not ready to share the results on this blog yet. Ibish, of Damascus, Syria, was on the top of my list of influential urban Middle Eastern horsemen of the twentieth century, along with Henri Pharaon of Beirut, Lebanon, Iskandar Qassis of Aleppo, Syria, and a few others. However, I can say a couple things about the horses he was associated with, at different times. I could find four of these, all stallions. The first, and perhaps most famous here in the US, was Aiglon. Aiglon was a Saqlawi Jadran imported by Ibish to Egypt for racing, around 1920, according to the export document for his daughter, *Exochorda, attested to by Dr. Branch, the Director of the Royal Agricultural Society of Egypt. *Exochorda, named after the ship that brought her to the USA, is of course best known as the dam of Sirecho. The second was El Sbaa. El Sbaa, a chestnut, was bought from Ahmad Ibish by a French government mission led by Madron and Denis at the Cairo Heliopolis racetrack in 1925, and sent to the French Stud of Pompadour where he was used as…