This had not happened since 2008. Baghdad woke up on Tuesday, February 11 in the snow, a rare phenomenon in this Middle Eastern country more used to suffering from extreme heat and which had known only a precedent in over a century. Twelve years ago, it was melted snow, mixed with rain showers. This time, several centimeters of snow covered cars, sidewalks and date palms, as our journalist on site testifies:
It's snowing in Baghdad! https://t.co/yRvwroKAM9
Tuesday morning, in addition to Baghdad, the holy Shiite city of Kerbala, further south, was also covered with a few centimeters of snow. In these two cities, the children were having fun by throwing snowballs in the streets. "This snowy episode will continue on Wednesday", said Amer Al-Jaberi, director of the Baghdad meteorological center, who said that the cold wave was coming from the European continent.
The mountainous Iraqi north is snow-covered every year and ski resorts have even sprung up in Kurdistan. But in the South, where the temperature exceeds 50 degrees Celsius in summer, snow is extremely rare.
Displaced camps covered with snow
In Mosul, the big city in the North, the Al-Nouri mosque – where the "Caliph" The self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) group had made its only public appearance – was on Tuesday in a blanket of snow, as were the rubble of the old city ravaged by war against jihadists. Elsewhere in the north, snow also covered the tents of the camps of hundreds of thousands of displaced people – driven from their homes by the breakthrough of IS in 2014 – or refugees, who came from neighboring Syria at war.
Iraq, of which a third of the 40 million inhabitants live on agriculture, suffers from chronic drought and the authorities assure to hope this year a better agricultural season because of the rains which fed the rivers, partly drained by the dams built in neighboring Turkey and Iran.
