BAGHDAD, Iraq

THE seconds just before a life is smashed are filled with ordinary things.

On the morning of Sept. 15, 2005, Muaad Hadi was on his way to a wedding. The highway was hot and crowded. His mind was filled with thoughts of work.

Shortly after 10:30 a.m., a convoy of police cars drew up behind the minivan of guests. Mr. Hadi, a 26-year-old Shiite, told the driver to pull over. As he spoke the words, an explosion, meant for the police, punched through the van and changed his life forever.

If wars had faces, the one in Iraq would look like Mr. Hadi’s. Open and hopeful at the beginning. Creased with disappointment as years passed. He and the other Iraqis from Baghdad pictured here are victims of fighting that has come from all directions in the last three years. They pay the price of the war with their arms and their legs. The toll is far higher for Iraqi civilians than for American soldiers. They account for 70 percent of all deaths. Their families, too, pay a price.

Mr. Hadi had not yet started a family. But before the bombing, he had plans to marry. He had found a job maintaining machines that make fabric. He was active in his mosque, and felt proud to be Shiite, a particular happiness after years of apologizing for it under Saddam Hussein.

Then, on that day in September, 12 bombs went off like popcorn all over Baghdad, scattering lives and punching holes in families. Mr. Hadi could barely see for the smoke. The air smelled of gasoline. A friend he had been sitting beside was dead. His legs would not work. He was missing his left hand. A stranger placed him in the back of a police truck, along with the bodies of the dead.

Ten months later, he spends his days lying on a narrow bed with a blue sheet in his mother’s living room in Shuala, a poor Shiite neighborhood. He must be helped to the bathroom. The woman he wanted to marry has moved on. She never told him she didn’t want him, but “I sensed what she wanted to say,” he said, his voice urgent and sad.

The last time Mr. Hadi was out of the house was this spring. He went to a clinic for prosthetic limbs in the Green Zone run by the American military. He wants to be able to walk again. “I want to complete my life in a normal way,” he said.