BAGHDAD  Doah Mohammed played a trick on her mother-in law on Tuesday.

She called her and told her that her son, Ms. Mohammed’s husband, had been arrested by American and Iraqi soldiers.

When she got the news, Ms. Mohammed’s mother-in-law gasped and said she was about to faint. So Ms. Mohammed quickly told her that it was only a prank, and the two women laughed  it was, after all, April Fools’ Day.

Before 2003, the traditional day of tricks and practical jokes  known here as Kithbet Neesan, or April Lie, and imported from the West decades ago  was observed much as it is in the United States. The teasing was biting, but ultimately tame. A man might try to convince a friend that he had gotten a visa to go to America, for example, or a mother might tell her son that his father had bought him a new car.

Even Saddam Hussein’s son Uday had joined in. On April 1, 1998, his newspaper published a front-page story saying that President Clinton had called for the United Nations sanctions against Iraq to be lifted. (On Page 2, readers learned that it was not true.)