The gaunt singer strikes a pose as if he's performing in a stadium rather than a nearly deserted space.
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.
Whoever orders whiskey
Christopher Ehrhardt
Correspondent for the Arab countries based in Beirut.
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It's another night that makes Kaniwar wonder if it was a good idea to come back to Raqqa and start 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
Raqqa has not found peace
Not so long ago, terror reigned in Raqqa and nightclubs were unthinkable.
The "Islamic State" (IS) had chosen the northern Syrian provincial town as its capital.
Months of brutal attrition began five years ago to drive the jihadists out of here.
They had set up a bloodthirsty regime.
Cruel executions became public spectacles, with the severed heads and torsos of the murdered displayed in the central Naeem Square.
Now there are man-high colorful plastic letters and a huge heart that add up to the slogan "I love Raqqa".
The people shook the horrors of IS rule and the war out of their limbs as best they could.
The streetscape is no longer dominated by exhaust-grey ruins, but by construction sites.
And some scenes give the impression, for a fleeting moment, that normality is back: when the popular restaurants fill up at lunchtime, when families picnic on the pebbly beaches on the banks of the Euphrates, when the children seek in the cold water cooling off from the summer heat and breakneck jumps perform from the car bridge.
But Raqqa has by no means found peace and confidence.
The destructive forces affecting the city and its surroundings are still too strong for that.
The IS threat is not over;
his pseudo-caliphate may have been erased from the map, but his sleeper cells continue to wreak havoc underground.
The city is a hub for terrorist smuggling activities.
In remote villages in the region, the jihadists are again in control at night.
“We must not let up.
If we loosen our grip just a little bit, IS will immediately take advantage of the freedom,” says a high-ranking officer in the security forces.