NINEWA: SONGS IN THE KEY OF AIN SIFNI

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 BAGHDAD 000750 SIPDIS E.O. 12958: DECL: 03/15/2019 TAGS: PGOV PREL PHUM SOCI IZ SUBJECT: NINEWA: SONGS IN THE KEY OF AIN SIFNI Classified By: PRT Leader Alex Laskaris; reasons 1.4b and d ¶1. (C) Summary: What do you get when a US Army band plays an Eastern Orthodox wedding hall in a Yezidi town with Arab, Christian and Kurdish musicians under the watchful gaze of the Barzani patriarch, a crucifix, and the Iraqi flag, plus a banner celebrating the anniversary of an anti-Saddam uprising? Most of the currents in Ninewa society met in Shaikhan District on Friday March 13: overbearing KDP officials, quietly proud local Yezidi voters, Arabs looking for any sign of Iraq as they know it, and a gifted but diminished Christian voice struggling vainly to be heard. The presence of five wonderful American ambassadors -- on tuba, trombone, French horn and trumpets -- made this gathering possible, and helped it morph into a pinkie-dancing conga line to a caterwauling beat -- a fleetingly inclusive Kurd-a-palooza in which we clearly danced to another's tune. End summary. ¶2. (SBU) PRT Ninewa,s public diplomacy section arranged the donation of musical instruments to the Mosul Fine Arts Institute. One of the conditions of the QRF grant was a series of concerts in Ninewa Province. At the request of our BCT partners, MND-N provided a brass quintet from the division band, and local organizers invited a well-known Kurdish traditional musician who, like Dylan, went electric. We chose Ain Sifni as the venue for the PRT's first-ever attempt at performing arts-based cultural diplomacy. It is a Yezidi town in the far northeast of Ninewa; its security is provided by the Peshmerga and Asa,ash and its politics is dominated by the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP). It has two Christian churches (one Orthodox and one Catholic) and tombs of two prominent Islamic scholars. The Arabic name of the town "Shaikhan" means "two sheikhs." The Kurdish "Ain Sifni" means "Spring of the Ark;" in the Yezidi faith, the trash-strewn spring that provides the town's heavily chlorinated drinking water was once the source of the water that flooded the Earth in the days of Noah. The district is also home to the largest Yezidi population in Iraq and has both the most important shrine in the Yezidi faith as well as the Lalesh Cultural Center, perhaps the most impressive civil society organization in Ninewa Province. - - - - - - - - - - A talented but drowned out Christian voice? - - - - - - - - - - ¶3. (C) As our Movement Team and PD sections secured and prepped the venue -- the wedding hall of the adjacent St. George,s Orthodox Church -- PRT leader met with local luminaries. Our first meeting was with a Christian chemist who, though a political independent, saw us at the headquarters of the Assyrian Democratic Movement (ADM). He told us that the quota system had been a catastrophe for the Ninewa Christian community and (uniquely among our Christian interlocutors) laid the blame exclusively on the Christian political class. He noted that Christians were under siege from all sides, surrounded by local and national dictators and migrating abroad in irreversible numbers. He lamented that Christians, as a group, are well educated, highly skilled Iraqis who are being squeezed out of the state as a consequence of the Arab-Kurd struggle for primacy in Ninewa. He complained that the KDP and the Al Hudba Gathering want supporters, not capable people filling the ranks of their bureaucracies. "If our skills don,t provide for us, what future do we have in Iraq," he asked; lacking an answer, we Qfuture do we have in Iraq," he asked; lacking an answer, we treated it as a rhetorical question. ¶4. (SBU) Even though the concert was taking place 50 yards from his house, he had not heard of it nor had he been invited. We arranged a table for him and his relatives in the back of the hall. First up were two young Christian music students from Mosul playing classical guitar music. A barn-like venue with a lousy sound system and 250 people who would have been arrested in the Kennedy Center is not the place for a guitar recital. Mercifully, our ever-ingenious PAO Diane Crow told our movement team to leave their dukes up, meaning the electronic counter-measures we employ against remote detonated IEDs served the higher purpose of keeping 250 Iraqis off their cell phones for two hours. ECM notwithstanding, the guitarists, one of whom was quite good, never had a chance and departed to the most tepid applause. ¶5. (SBU) Arab conservatory students were next up on piano (electric) and violin, playing a respectable mazurka with slightly less tumult from the boisterous crowd. We had a momentary panic when, after distracting us for less than a minute earlier in the day, local organizers snuck a pair of Kurdish flags onto the stage, to go with the one on the front of the podium. Even our dukes could not overcome that, so our PAO ordered the town scoured for an Iraqi flag. From BAGHDAD 00000750 002 OF 003 whence it came we may never know, but by show-time, the new Iraqi flag was up between the two Kurdish banners. Our Arab Muslim guests, who never would have dared to make the trip up without our sponsorship, took it all in stride but were grateful for the gesture. Just as it took American intervention to place the symbols of the Iraqi state in the venue, it took two US Army trumpeters playing a trio with the Arab pianist to win over the audience. - - - - - - - - - - Kurdish Yezidi or Yezidi Kurds? - - - - - - - - - - ¶6. (C) Following his Christian meeting, PRT leader called on the new mayor of Shaikhan District: Hasso Narmo Hussein, a Yezidi from Dahuk by way of Hamburg. The fact that with every point he made, Mayor Hasso looked over to Fareeq Farouk (KDP Branch Chairman for Shaikhan) for approbation, and subsequent conversations, provided a glimpse into the interplay of Yezidi identity with Kurdish politics. Hasso opened the meeting with a long discourse on the history of the Kurdish people, saving a 30-second burst at the end for a request for USG projects in the area. While he told us that he is a Yezidi, he made no effort to establish that as a discrete identity. Others, however, did. We ran into a New York Times reporter who got wind of the concert in Irbil. He corroborated what we have been hearing from Yezidi throughout the province: they had a carefully orchestrated plan to vote for Yezidi candidates on the KDP-dominated Ninewa Fraternity List (NFL). We heard this as far afield as Sinjar. The Yezidi did what the Christians did not even attempt; they voted for their own but without the vehicle of a sectarian-based party. The end result was nine Yezidis on a 37-seat Council, far in excess of the single quota seat and well in excess of their numbers. ¶7. (C) Farouq eventually tired of speaking to us through a Yezidi proxy; he took over the conversation by repeatedly referring to Shaikhan as part of "Kurdistan." We reminded him that it is part of a larger swath of territory referred to as the DIBs region, as in "disputed." Although they would presuably disagree on most everything else, Farouq and Ninewa Governor Atheel Alnujaifi agree that there is no dispute. Unlike Alnujaifi, however, Farouq believes Shaikhan and other parts of Ninewa are Kurdistan not Ninewa, a reality he said was proven through elections and ready to be ratified by UNAMI and the USG. When we said that -- what with this being the new Iraq -- "dispute" implies resolution through some sort of dialog, Farouq replied, "we,ll discuss it, but if someone tries to take it away, there will be conflict." ¶8. (C) In planning the concert we had actually shied away from a Friday gig, and not because the Friday in question was the thirteenth. As our hosts insisted, we happily drove the 90 minutes north to the venue. What they neglected to tell us, probably not by oversight, was that March 13 is the anniversary of the 1991 Shaikhan uprising against Saddam. As we were driving from the mayor,s office to the hall, we were stopped by a "spontaneous" street festival of dancing townies, a tableau that would have made Potemkim blush. Since traffic was coincidently blocked by a drummer, a horn player, and 12 Kurds-a-dancing, we had to watch and be filmed watching the commemoration of an uprising that led to untold brutality against the people of the town. - - - - - - - - - - American voices: conveners but still an opening act - - - - - - - - - - Q- - - - - - - - - - ¶9. (C) All of our interlocutors stressed that it was up to the USG to ensure that the Iraqi constitution is respected and implemented; the Christians want us to enforce the minority rights provisions and the KDP insisted that it is our obligation to implement Article 140. In the face of those demands, we offered five gifted army musicians playing jazz, Dixieland and army standards. Five brass musicians, anchored by an improbably slight tuba player, quickly got and held the room,s attention. However, by the quintet,s seventh piece, the organizers were clearly looking to move on to the headliner. The Americans got the ball rolling and were treated as honored guests, but we were just an opening act. (Note: Our musicians disproved the monstrous calumny that there are too many American ambassadors in Iraq; they did so both by their performance and the obvious warmth they exuded throughout a long day.) - - - - - - - - - - This Kurd goes up to 11 - - - - - - - - - - ¶10. (SBU) The headliner was a well known Kurdish musician, BAGHDAD 00000750 003 OF 003 playing a traditional instrument plugged into an industrial-sized amplifier and accompanied by a synthesizer capable of laying down a back-beat and replicating Kurdish horns. Within a few seconds, it was impossible to hear anyone speaking in the crowd; Kurdish caterwauling filled every nook and cranny in the room, and the inevitable dance of the inter-locked pinkies began, first as a contrived display, but eventually as a bona fide Kurdish hoe-down. As PRT leader,s radio call sign is "Dances with Nobody," all COM personnel were barred from joining in. Our two trumpet players, however, who do not fall under COM authority, locked digits with the locals and joined the pinkie-led conga line. ¶11. (C) Hostile or friendly, loud or subdued -- there was only one voice in the end. It was a Kurdish voice but one that the critics knew had been cleverly and subtly subverted by the Yezidi. Christians, Sunni Muslims and Americans had their turn on the stage, but this was a Yezidi-inflected Kurd-a-palooza. Even the KDP could not dominate an assertion of complex identity, a group of people whose continued existence in a twice-hostile world is their daily accomplishment. Whether we,re dealing with Kurds or Yezidi, we have to always bear in mind that they celebrate survival. Insofar as we are viewed as protectors, we are friends. However, we are second-tier friends compared to the mountains, in whom the Yezidi and Kurds place their enduring trust. The power of our instruments, acting through the power of our soldiers, can quiet the crowd when we are all in harmony, but it cannot long overpower the indigenous noise of this place. BUTENIS