What do you do if militiamen are fighting in your neighbourhood, there are decomposing bodies in the streets and your country is falling apart around you? Well, you could always go swimming. Or try to get a date. Or practise your guitar.

Those are some of the things that three twentysomething Iraqi men do in Hometown Baghdad, a series of video diaries posted on the internet and designed to give outsiders a rare glimpse of how normal young people struggle to hang on to something resembling everyday life when their city is in meltdown.

The films of the three young students from Baghdad take viewers beyond the headlines of death and destruction, to show that not all Iraqis are militiamen, terrorists or their victims.

The short video clips were filmed by and feature Adel, a rocker with a goatee beard who learnt English from Iron Maiden songs; Saif, a shaven-headed dentistry student who smokes a hubbly-bubbly pipe; and Ausama, a chipper medical student who resembles Tom Cruise in the film Risky Business.

The project was the brain-child of the youth outreach programme Chat the Planet, which is based in New York. It uses a Baghdad-based producer and crew to find a sample of young Iraqi students willing to film their daily lives. The only requirement was that they speak English.

In the clip Saif Heart Noor, the affable, pot-bellied dental student takes his girlfriend out on a date. They have to take a male friend along – “It’s too dangerous to have a girl and a guy in a car alone,” Saif explains before they head for a restaurant. But even joking around in the restaurant, they have to keep an eye on the clock for the 8pm curfew, and start to get frustrated when their food arrives late.

In another episode, The Last Resort, when the heat and lack of electricity get them down, Adel and his friends decide to cool off in a private swimming pool. That the pool is in the empty house of family friends who have fled the country is the only reminder of the reality outside. The videos are posted on the American edition of YouTube, specifically chosen because few Iraqis visit it. The young men put their security above any desire for fame.

“We wanted to show that even in the worst situation people just go [on] with their lives because they don’t have any choice,” Adel said.

The strangeness of Baghdad is that a version of normality can survive alongside random bloodshed. Ausama, who admits to being very shy, tries to celebrate finishing his exams by inviting out some girls, only to receive a wartime snub. “I can’t do anything,” one girl complains. “I can’t go to the market or shopping or even go in a car.”

Humour is the shield that deflects the more bizarre horrors. In Forbidden Salad, Ausama’s family sit down to dinner and discuss leaflets handed out by Islamist extremists banning the mixing of cucumber and tomato, thought to represent male and female sexuality.

“In some areas this salad is now forbidden,” laughs Ausama, as he tucks into a Greek salad. “And now we are eating it. They claim it is against Islamic law. By their standards, I am a criminal.”

While adapting to the violence around them, the three young men never accept it. In Brains on Campus, Adel points out a spot in the college quad where a student had his head blown off in an explosion. Saif gives a tour of all the cages he has installed on his windows, the barbed wire on the rooftops of his respectable neighbourhood, with amazement and resignation. He and Adel show off the guns with which they may have to defend their homes.

One of the most disturbing scenes comes when Adel interviews his little brother about the nightmares the 13-year-old boy has after witnessing a man dying in the street on the way back from school. “Blood and pieces of his brain were all over the street and he was crying,” says the boy, before running off to innocently play shoot ’em up games with a friend.

About 20 episodes have been posted on YouTube and the series will run to 45. But there won’t be any more. Adel is now the only one of the video-diarists still in Iraq, depressed and afraid and waiting until his finals to leave the country.

“As a friend of mine put it, ‘We’re only living now because we’re not dead’,” he told The Times. “You just want to try to stay safe, and that’s it.”

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