Snowy Baghdad enjoys White Zone
Nope, no climate change here!
Snowy Baghdad enjoys White Zone – CNN.com
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.
January 12th, 2008 at 11:46 am
Snow’s magic all right.