A yellow three-wheeled tuk-tuk is swarming from a crowd of protesters as gunfire reverberates in the air and black smoke rises.
Volunteers in red jackets pull an injured protester from the back of the vehicle and carry him to an ambulance parked in the area.
It is an unregulated Baghdad-style rescue during week-long protests that turned the streets of the Iraqi capital into a battleground.
More than 110 people were killed and 6,000 injured in demonstrations in six days.
Witnesses said they saw snipers kill or injure protesters from rooftops.
Protesters say ambulances either could not reach the victims in crowded streets or were themselves sniper targets.
Tuk-tuk drivers, who make a living by transporting passengers in the streets, filled the ambulance vacuum and took to the streets to pick up the victims.
"Anyone is toppling, we are picking it up," said Karrar, the owner of the yellow tuk-tuk, who rushed back to the crowd for a new rescue operation.
He added that ambulances coming to transport victims of the protests were gone irrevocably. "They kill the wounded, even in ambulances." "We wounded them," he said. "We want them to be hospitalized. And this shooting is on us and we are peaceful, we have no weapon, we have nothing."
As the protesters fled amid the firing of tear gas, the red-tuk-tuk driver drove his vehicle into the scene and shots were fired near him.
The driver said the tuk-tuk transported the wounded and helped the protesters, whom he described as poor. He said troops were shooting at protesters and that the vehicles were taking them to hospitals.