Baghdad: The man in the bulky bomb disposal suit waved at a gaggle of awed children as he walked down a Baghdad street and sat outside a small cafe to drink tea.
But there was no bomb to defuse on Rasheed Street that day, and no armour inside the black suit to protect him from explosives.
Iraqi artist Hussein Adil designed the mock bomb suit -- complete with huge helmet and visor -- himself for this performance.
"We had to make this one because there aren't many bomb suits in Iraq," he said. "We have to be one of the countries in the world that needs them the most."
Adil, a wispy 20-year-old with a wild head of tight curly hair, is one of an ever growing number of Iraqi artists looking for new ways of tackling the violence they grew up with.
The inspiration for his "bomb suit happening" was the death last year in a suicide car bombing of his close friend Ammar al-Shahbander, a much-loved journalist.
Adil, Shahbander and two other friends were heading to a cafe to drink tea in Baghdad's Karrada district when an important call came in on his mobile phone.
"I told them to go ahead, that I would follow them in five minutes," Adil said.
He heard an explosion moments later. After searching for them for hours, he found one of his friends with a head injury in hospital and was told that Shahbander had been killed.
Two weeks later, he dreamt that a bomb would go off near a square in central Baghdad and, after waking up, immediately called his friends and his father to tell them.
An explosion rocked the exact spot later that day.
"My friends called me to ask me how I knew, it was a very strange thing," he said, adding it was then that he started looking for ways to express his angst through art.
AFP
