(Recast) Feature: In war-ravaged Syria, snow a depressing scene for many

Nine-year-old Samiha, in a thin, red sweater, jeans and a pair of blue plastic slippers that exposed her toes, was snowball fighting with her younger sisters, Manal and Randa, in Jaramana, a neighborhood 10 km southeast of the capital Damascus.

Asked where her home was, Samiha, shivering but smiling, pointed to an unfinished building, her bare hands red, her eyes watering.

A winter storm lasted all Wednesday and stretched into Thursday, dumping up to 30 cm of snow in Damascus and its suburbs.

Samiha, whose family fled from their home in Aleppo province in the north, was among the 6.5 million internally displaced Syrians who have to cope with a cold snap that brought the temperature to hover between zero and five degrees Celsius.

Abu Hussam, whose extended family of 15 members live in another unfinished house near Samiha's, came from a village near Ayn al-Arab, a predominantly Kurdish town also known as Kobane that came under attack by Islamic State militants.

Unlike the children, 48-year-old Hussam was in no mood to enjoy the snow-covered cityscape.

Rather than a good omen and a source of joy, the snow and the ensuing cold only added to the misery of Hussam and his fellow refugees, who have difficulty getting enough food, let alone heating.

Before the crisis that has gripped Syria since 2011, people would share photos of cute icemen on social networking sites after a major snowfall. This year, however, online posts of prayers for the refugees and displaced people have eclipsed those sharing Dean Martin's "Let it Snow!" song.

Hussam sometimes has to cram more than 40 people into his rented 100-square-meter apartment, which costs him 8,000 Syrian pounds, or 50 U.S. dollars, a month, when fellow villagers visit.

"We have no heating diesel or electricity," Hussam said. "Sometimes we burn firewood to warm up a bit."

Hussam, who used to tend to his farmland in Ayn al-Arab, and the other men in the family who now works odd jobs at construction sites, can barely keep ends meet.

Like dozens of other families in the neighborhood, Hussam has to rely largely on community contributions and donations from local charity and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent.

Just blocks away in the same neighborhood, Um Youssef, an Aleppo native in her 40s, and her big family of 16 members, mostly children, live in a house with far worse condition than that of Hussam.

The house was without proper flooring. Only thin rugs cover the dark-gray concrete. The kitchen, which could only be identified by a rusty pot, was in the left corner right after the doorway. On the same spot, there was a pile of old clothes covered by a dark-colored sheet. The bathroom, in the opposite corner, was filled with broken concrete bricks without a tub or even a faucet.

Placing her one-year-old son on her lap, Um Youssef said she didn't even have socks for the toddler.

"You can touch his feet. Feel how cold they are," she said, tossing away the thin sheet covering the boy's legs.

"When we were in our village, we used to enjoy the snow," Youssef said. "But now we are really feeling the cold."

"There is no fuel, no heat, and my kids don't have clothes. I fire up some firewood in empty olive oil cans to get warm," she said, choking back tears.

"For us, snow has turned from a source of delight to a source of depression," she said. Endit