The nattily-dressed Iraqis mingled in a New Delhi ballroom, clinked crystal glasses before a four-course dinner - just part of a an Indian exercise to turn 14 foreign office men and women from Baghdad into fully-fledged diplomats.
Lounge etiquette session over, the eager team plunged into international studies, and an Indian academic took them through regional groupings, trade regimes, barriers, treaties and acronymns that every diplomat needs to work.
"Let us start. Do we know which are the countries in Southeast Asia?" professor M.Kaul asked the team, which includes two with 20 years of diplomatic service under their belts and one French-speaking woman who boasts eight years in the Iraqi foreign service.
Indian foreign office secretary, Santosh Kumar, who is also dean of the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), said the eight-week course for the 10 Iraqi men and four women began on January 19 following a request from the US-backed interim administration in Baghdad.
"This symbolises our commitment to helping Iraq in humanitarian assistance and its reconstruction," Kumar said at the reception, where starchy diplomatic correctness scored full marks.
Iraq's FSI collapsed and its diplomatic presence shrunk to just 40 nations after the US-led war toppled then president Saddam Hussein's regime, forcing Baghdad to turn to the Indian nursery to rear a new generation that is not stigmatised by dark legacies.
"Iraq is at a crucial stage and as (it) hopes to resume its sovereignty and active membership of the world community, its foreign service will play a crucial role because an interface with the world now is crucial," Kumar said.
FSI project director Lal Dingliana said the intensive course included economics, politics, disarmament, demarche, bilateral negotiations, consular work, computer skills and "every other skill that they would require as diplomats".
India opposed the US-led invasion of Iraq in April, rejected US requests to send troops to Iraq and instead offered its skills and assistance on the back of a greater UN role to help the war-ravaged country. "We are getting experts from our own diplomatic reservoir and from the academic community to train these people," Dingliana said.
Indian foreign ministry spokesman Navtej Sarna said India was one of the first countries to offer such training to Iraq at the New Delhi-based FSI, which has so far trained 800 diplomats from 100 countries since 1992.
"We have always supported all efforts at reconciliation and rehabilitation in Iraq and one of our fortes has been training," Sarna said, adding that the crash-course, which will also take the Iraqis to various Indian cities, will help strengthen bilateral ties.
The trainees themselves appeared to enjoy the grind.
"We are picking up communication skills and various other valuable tips," said Camellia Al-Ubedi, the French-speaking Iraqi, who described Iraq's shattered diplomatic corps as a "temporary problem". Rookies such as Amany Roomy said the new generation of Iraqi diplomats would not shy away from their duties and that it would be unfair if the international community tarred Iraq's diplomatic corps with the country's brutal past.
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