Snow Falls in Damascus

Vicious snowball fights break out all over Damascus, where snow fell yesterday for the first time since about 1995

Yesterday evening when I crossed the mountains above Beirut, the highest point on the road to Damascus, I thought I'd passed through the worst of a gathering snowstorm. Boy was I wrong -- the next six hours (of what normally is a two hour journey) was one of the more dangerous road trips I've ever done.

The tire tread on my ancient Chevy Caprice Classic taxi must have been as smooth as a baby's bottom, because we began fishtailing on the stretch of no-man's highway between the Lebanese border and the Syrian border below, and I had a bad moment at Syrian immigration when they couldn't find my journalist visa and making it back to Lebanon was physically impossible. By the time I'd cleared customs, enough snow had piled up that the entire highway was like an amusement park bumper car course, with bonus obstacles created by abandoned cars immobilized by black ice. (Ours got stuck twice.) The Syrian rescue crews consisted of a few unlucky police officers who would run alongside sliding cars throwing rubber mats under the wheels when they lost traction. I kept thinking that the farther we dropped down towards Damascus, the better the conditions would get, but the last hillside descent turned out to be the most dangerous, with overturned trucks crushing passenger cars, and one hatchback spinning out in front of us like a giant frisbee. With great drifts of snow -- the heaviest in Syria for over a decade -- obscuring the normally semi-desert vista, it could have been a scene straight out of New England, albeit with drivers clearly less used to winter road conditions, palm trees instead of maples, and of course, portraits of President Bashar al-Assad appearing suddenly out of the darkness.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Damascus