While I was in Antibes at the Underwater Festival this last week I happened across an article in the International Herald Tribune entitled In troubled Lebanon, a safety zone for sea turtles. It tells the story of Mona Khalil and Habiba Syed and their admirable and heroic efforts to save the few remaining nesting sea turtles in a war-torn beach near Tyre, Lebanon. It's only one of three nesting beaches left in Lebanon, and they have greens and loggerheads but no leatherbacks. The women monitor the beach and put down wire mesh to protect the nests from being dug up by foxes. During the recent fighting their house was hit by an Israeli rocket. However, they had evacuated and none of the nests were damaged. You can read the story from the Tribune here: http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/10/23/features/turtles.php.

I did a little poking around and found that this wasn't the only article on Mona Khalil and Habiba Syed protecting their sea turtles. There's another article published by the World Conservation Union (http://www.iucn.org) which provides additional details. Here's a quote from the article:

Go to http://www.iucn.org/places/wescana/news/turtle.html. I cadged the nice photo of Mona and a nesting green from this article.

MSNBC also picked up the story from Reuters, which you can read at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15195692/.

These incredible women devote themselves to rescuing sea turtles in a war zone. What could possibly be more heroic than that?