One house apparently wasn't big enough for Odai's women. To one side, a gaudy house filled with bedrooms that is now a camp for U.S. soldiers appeared to once have housed women. It had statuettes of couples in foreplay, and couches everywhere with fluffy pillows. And it boasted another swimming pool, with a bar.

"The pink and the cheesiness suggest it was a concubines' house," Ballanco said. Behind the house was a pen holding two cheetahs, five lion cubs and a young bear.

Three German shepherds who guarded the compound have been adopted by soldiers, who feed them military rations. For the wilder animals, soldiers have been throwing in sheep from a nearby pen, said Spc. Pete Adams, of Lexington, Va. A feeding on Sunday, he said, "looked like something from the National Geographic Channel."