BAGHDAD, April 4 (Xinhua) -- Who holds the hidden ring? In a downtown Baghdad museum steeped with joyful folk music, players of Mehiebes were excited to have women, for the first time, racing in the Iraqi traditional game.

The Mehiebes, or "the hidden ring," is a communal game conventionally played among Iraqi men of different ages formed in two teams.

Popular during the holy month of Ramadan, the game is no longer limited to men.

Organized by a group of Iraqi women, the game at the al-Baghdadi Museum welcomed their fellow sisters to have a showdown at nightfall of Ramadan, following a day of dawn-to-dusk fast.

"It is a beautiful initiative by some women who insist on fulfilling a wish we have dreamed of since childhood. We wanted to play it, but customs and traditions always prevented us," said Khairiyah Mahdi Salih, a female referee of the competition recently told Xinhua.

For the game, one team gets the ring, and its leader will hide the ring in the hand of one of its team members. Then, all members will clench their fists, waiting for the rival team leader to find out who holds the ring, hunting for clues from facial expressions one by one.

The winners will get large plates of popular Iraqi sweets, named Zalabiyah and Baqlawa, and it is also customary for them to share the delights with the defeated.

"Women used to watch the race, only cheering and eating sweets. But today, we can play the game and entertain ourselves just as men do," Salih added.

According to Salih, they have organized two such Mehiebes trials during Ramadan to form a women's team for a mixed match on the eve of Eid al-Fitr.

The fast-breaking festival is slated for April 9 or 10, depending on the crescent moon of the following month.

"I am very happy to play Mehiebes publicly for the first time with the women's team because I used to be a fan of my brother's team when they played the game," Ibtsam Ali, a female player, told Xinhua.

"I hope that every city in Iraq has a women's team for Mehiebes so that we can compete like the men's teams do," she added.

Khalil Ibrahim al-Abdullah, an Iraqi folk culture researcher, told Xinhua that the Mehiebes is a long-established popular game that can be traced back to more than three centuries ago. Still, women's participation in this game is a rather new phenomenon.

"This would increase the game's popularity as women constitute nearly half of the population of Iraq," al-Abdullah said. Enditem

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