Snow falls in Baghdad
BAGHDAD (AP) - January 11, 2008 The morning flurry Friday was the first in memory in the heart
of the Iraqi capital. Perhaps more significant, however, was the
rare ripple of delight through a city snarled by army checkpoints,
divided by concrete walls and ravaged by sectarian killings.
"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."
After weathering nearly five years of war, Baghdad residents
thought they'd pretty much seen it all. But as muezzins were
calling the faithful to prayer, the people here awoke to something
certifiably new.
Snow is common in the mountainous Kurdish areas of northern
Iraq, but residents of the capital and surrounding areas could
remember just hail. And that, only very occasionally.
Summer temperatures in Baghdad are routinely a sweltering 120
degrees and winters generally mild.
But this week has been unusually cold and blustery, with
overnight temperatures more than 10 degrees below normal. On
Thursday morning, the thermometer hovered around freezing after a
low of 27, and the Baghdad airport closed because of low
visibility.
"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 out 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 the Tigris River to the Green Zone became
united as one big White Zone. There were no reports of bloodshed
during the snowstorm. The snow showed no favoritism as it dusted
neighborhoods Shiite and Sunni alike, faintly falling (with
apologies to James Joyce) upon all the living and the dead.