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Baghdad residents awoke to the sight of snow falling for the first time and uncharacteristically low temperatures. -- REUTERS
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BAGHDAD - AFTER weathering nearly five years of war, Baghdad residents thought they'd pretty much seen it all. But on 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 Mr 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,' Mr 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 could remember just hail.
Some said they'd seen snow only in movies.
Mr Talib Haider, a 19-year-old college student, said 'a friend of mine called me at 8 am 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 am 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 mortars routinely zoom across to the Green Zone became united as one big White Zone. As of midday, there were no reports of violence. The snow showed no favoritism as it fell faintly on neighbourhoods Shiite and Sunni alike, and upon all the living and the dead. -- AP
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