That's a wonderful story!

Seven months later, he settled in a council house in Carrick-on-Shannon in County Leitrim and started introducing himself to other musically minded people. He met Nyahh Records’ Willie Stewart in 2018, who was DJing at a local event celebrating the culture of new international communities in Country Leitrim. Syfkhan asked Stewart if he could plug his bouzouki into his mixing desk so he could play, which filled the room with adults and children doing traditional Syrian and Kurdish dances. “I was both stunned and excited,” Stewart recalls. “I immediately began to start booking him gigs.”

As part of that diaspora from Syria in 2016, do you remember when so many refugees were camped out in Calais on the French coast trying to get through the tunnel to the UK? There were musicians in that settlement who met and started performing, eventually creating a makeshift studio for recording. There is a YouTube channel and a website still up. It appears that Syfkhan is another one of those talented musicians who took a different route to flee the war.

I've set this link as a "gift" from my New York Times account, so anyone should be able to read it. Musicians in a Refugee Camp in France Record ‘The Calais Sessions’. (I probably posted this 8 years ago when it first appeared because I bought their album.)