A first! Snow falls in
Baghdad
BAGHDAD - After weathering nearly five years of war, Baghdad
residents thought they'd pretty much seen it all. But Friday
morning, as muezzins were calling the faithful to prayer, the
people here awoke to something certifiably new.
For the first time in memory, snow fell across Baghdad.
Although the white flakes quickly dissolved into gray puddles, they
brought an emotion rarely expressed in this desert capital snarled
by army checkpoints, divided by concrete walls and ravaged by
sectarian killings delight.
"For the first time in my life I saw a snow-rain like this falling
in Baghdad," said Mohammed Abdul-Hussein, a 63-year-old retiree
from the New Baghdad area.
"When I was young, I heard from my father that such rain had fallen
in the early '40s on the outskirts of northern Baghdad,"
Abdul-Hussein said, referring to snow as a type of rain. "But snow
falling in Baghdad in such a magnificent scene was beyond my
imagination."
Morning temperatures uncharacteristically hovered around freezing,
and the Baghdad airport was closed because of poor visibility. Snow
is common in the mountainous Kurdish areas of northern Iraq, but
residents of the capital and surrounding areas could remember just
hail.
"I asked my mother, who is 80, whether she'd ever seen snow in Iraq
before, and her answer was no," said Fawzi Karim, a 40-year-old
father of five who runs a small restaurant in Hawr Rajab, a village
six miles southeast of Baghdad.
"This is so unusual, and I don't know whether or not it's a lesson
from God," Karim said.
Some said they'd seen snow only in movies.
Talib Haider, a 19-year-old college student, said "a friend of mine
called me at 8 a.m. to wake me up and tell me that the sky is
raining snow."
"I rushed quickly to the balcony to see a very beautiful scene," he
said. "I tried to film it with my cell phone camera. This scene has
really brought me joy. I called my other friends and the morning
turned to be a very happy one in my life."
An Iraqi who works for The Associated Press said he woke his wife
and children shortly after 7 a.m. to "have a look at this strange
thing." He then called his brother and sister and found them awake,
also watching the "cotton-like snow drops covering the
trees."
For a couple of hours anyway, a city where mortar shells routinely
zoom across to the Green Zone became united as one big White Zone.
As of late afternoon, there were no reports of violence. The snow
showed no favoritism as it fell faintly on neighborhoods Shiite and
Sunni alike, and (with apologies to James Joyce) upon all the
living and the dead.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080111/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_first_snow_in_memory