Identifier
Created
Classification
Origin
09BAGHDAD750
2009-03-19 08:00:00
CONFIDENTIAL
Embassy Baghdad
Cable title:  

NINEWA: SONGS IN THE KEY OF AIN SIFNI

Tags:  PGOV PREL PHUM SOCI IZ 
pdf how-to read a cable
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DE RUEHGB #0750/01 0780800
ZNY CCCCC ZZH
O 190800Z MAR 09
FM AMEMBASSY BAGHDAD
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC IMMEDIATE 2278
INFO RUCNRAQ/IRAQ COLLECTIVE IMMEDIATE
RHMFISS/HQ USCENTCOM MACDILL AFB FL IMMEDIATE
RHMFISS/HQ USEUCOM VAIHINGEN GE IMMEDIATE
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

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,

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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