Dhe gaunt singer strikes a pose as if he were performing in a stadium and not in an almost deserted room. He sings of love, of which there is little to be felt here, in a nightclub in the Syrian city of Raqqa. Dimness bathed in colorful light prevails. A couple of men are sitting at a table, not sure if they should keep hoping that something exciting will happen after all. Everyone smokes, nobody dances, nobody drinks. An entertainer has given up. She sits at the end of the room, her face lit up by her phone’s display. Another sits in the small circle of an otherwise exclusively male birthday party. She’s made up like a clown. The waiters are desperately busy. They sell arak and whiskey. Those who are wise order arak. If you order whiskey, you get a bottle of “Red Abo Sakho”, a bad firewater.
It’s another night that makes Kaniwar wonder if it was a good idea to come back to Raqqa and open a nightclub. “You need patience,” he says. Until the place is as famous as the restaurant in Beirut where he worked before. He much prefers to talk about the splendor of those days than about the conditions in Raqqa and the complicated conflicts in the region. He will probably have to wait a while for the big rush. His nightclub still seems lost on a dirt track beyond the lighted streets. Elsewhere one would speak of the best location. The restaurant is located on the banks of the Euphrates, which is why it is also called “neighbor of the river”. Kaniwar says he doesn’t understand why so little is being done in the area. And then he talks about the paralyzing insecurity that makes it so difficult for people like him to build something.