Half a dozen exhausted paramedics crowd around the television in their shabby lounge, watching a Kevin Spacey movie in Arabic and waiting for the next inevitable car bomb.
Before the fall of Saddam Hussein, Red Crescent paramedics in Baghdad were used to responding to heart attacks and car accidents, house fires and falls.
Now they drive to the aftermath of car bombs and mortar attacks, gathering up body parts and risking their own lives.
They say they have had to grow accustomed to seeing mutilated men, women and children and coping with large numbers of casualties at a time.
Since an insurgency against US-led forces began 16 months ago, hardly a day goes by in Baghdad without an explosion, which rattles the soot-covered windows of the headquarters and sends the paramedics rushing to their ambulances.
"We have become experts. When we hear an explosion we can tell exactly where the bomb went off. We can send the ambulances to the scene by ear," said Juad Kalthim Zaboon, a bulky man with dark bags under his eyes who serves as ambulance director.
Slumped over a table in the headquarters, Jabir Tawfiq, the phone operator at the Red Crescent, answers calls from nine old telephones constantly ringing in front of him.
He chain-smokes while he notes down addresses, which he passes to a waiting paramedic. The centre has 70 ambulances for a city of 5 million people, which can also be sent to help with heavy casualties further afield.
"Psychologically this is a very stressful job. When the war was over, we thought that things would calm down but it has been the other way around. I now smoke two packs of cigarettes a day. Smoking eases my stress," Tawfiq said.
As insurgents step up attacks, the paramedics, who wear ordinary civilian clothes, have grown bedraggled and exhausted.
Their eyes are bloodshot and, like Tawfiq, they smoke more than ever. At bomb scenes, they work with the eerie awareness that a second explosion might occur at any moment, or that a sniper is about to open fire on them, they said.
Earlier this month, one of their group was wounded in the head during a shootout in the southern city of Najaf, where US troops and Iraqi security forces are fighting Shia rebels. The man survived and is on leave.
"We're all willing to give our lives for the people of Iraq," said Tawfiq, who also drives an ambulance.
"We feel we're doing something important. When a bomb goes off, I worry about my family, especially if it went off in my street. But my job comes first. I do my job, then I call to see if my family and friends are safe."
Zaboon, the ambulance director, said just getting to the scene of an explosion is difficult. Coalition checkpoints and traffic jams cause long delays.
He said attacks are becoming more sophisticated yet more indiscriminate, inflicting more civilian casualties.
On August 1 bombs exploded outside four churches in Baghdad, killing more than a dozen people and wounding scores in attacks apparently timed to coincide with evening prayers.
"We put more ambulances on alert when there is an explosion. We always have a feeling there is going to be more than one."
Years of international sanctions and wars have turned Iraq's hospitals into hulls plagued by blackouts and leaks.
The paramedic office is ill-equipped and lacks air conditioning, with peeling yellowed paint, rags for curtains and missing windowpanes. Basic medical equipment is missing, doctors said.
"It's not easy to be a doctor in Iraq," said Zaid Abid-Ali, an emergency surgeon at Baghdad's central Iarmuk hospital.
It is near the Green Zone, the fortified complex that houses the Iraqi government and the US embassy, and is a favourite target of insurgents.
"There is no anaesthesia in the emergency room so we have to use simple drugs. There is no phone in my office and I don't even have a beeper,'" said Abid-Ali, who earns $200 a month.
"We are dealing with a new phenomenon. We were not trained for this but we have learned. Now, with minimal supplies we save lives, extracting bullets or shrapnel, sewing up wounds."
Novice paramedics learn resuscitation techniques on beat-up plastic dummies dressed in 70s-era clothing and they watch old training videos on a film projector with rusty reels. "Iraq has been in many wars. Our doctors and nurses have seen it all," said Nabeel Musa, director of first aid training at the Red Crescent.
He said he recently updated his first aid manual for paramedics - a new chapter on car bomb victims.
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