Politics and Culture

It's nice to see kids and adults in Iraq with smiles on their faces.

It takes a lot of discipline for religious people not to see such an occurrence, taking place as it did simultaneously with calls to prayer on the Muslim Sabbath, as a sign from God. I won't say so because of my non-Pat Robertson-filter current events through my theology-policy, but still, it's nice.

Snow falls in Baghdad for the first time in memory, delighting residents

BAGHDAD (AP): 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.''