Even before his close encounter with a car bomb, Sadiq Jasim Hassan had decided it was too risky to continue opening his clothes shop in the Kerrada district of Baghdad.

“There were too many bombs going off,” says Mr Hassan, who started working as a taxi driver. “But the only way to survive as a taxi driver is if you never stop,” he adds, his face bearing the scars from a day he did stop, in a central Baghdad square, just before a suicide bomber attacked.