Home >  Gallery >  World >  Iraqi artist imagines...

Iraqi artist imagines life in a bomb suit

The inspiration for his bomb suit happening' was death of his close friend in a suicide car bombing last year.

By :  amrit sadhana
Update: 2016-02-22 08:46 GMT
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.
Baghdad has been rocked by hundreds of car bombs over the years, sometimes several in a day during periods when violence peaked. Those blasts and other attacks have killed tens of thousands of civilians and left many residents with deep trauma that remains when violence ebbs, as is the case now in the city.
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.
'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.
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.
'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 for tackling the violence they grew up with.
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 visors himself for this performance.
The inspiration for his bomb suit happening' was death of his close friend in a suicide car bombing last year.

Similar News

19 bodies recovered after landslide swept two buses into river in Nepal

In Pictures | COP26 protesters in Glasgow

This year, Hajj pilgrims to be given sterilised pebbles

For these penguins in Singapore's city zoo, lockdown is flippin' fun