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IN Iraq, nobody knows, and few in authority seem concerned to count, just how many civilians have been killed and injured. Soon it will be three years since the American-led invasion. The estimates of those killed run into the tens of thousands, the numbers of wounded two or three times the number who lost their lives. Even President Bush, estimating recently that 30,000 civilians may have been killed, acknowledged that was no more than an abstraction from unofficial calculations, not a Pentagon count.

To take his own measure of the war for The New York Times, Adam Nadel broke from the compulsions that dictate the days of many photographers in Baghdad, the suicide bombings and roadside explosions and assassinations that fill the morgues and the hospitals. Over weeks, he went in search of those who had survived attacks, and others whose lives had been upended by the violence. He visited them in their hospital wards, in their neighborhoods, and in their homes, and captured, in images and in words, what the war has meant for them.

Their portraits and their stories compel attention, not because they have endured worse than others, but because their miseries are so commonplace, because they stand for what thousands of Iraqi families have endured, directly or through ties of community and tribe. In his or her own way, each of these survivors is a totem for all, in a war where nobody has an exemption from the bombs and the bullets and the carelessness, or mischance, that determines who lives and who dies.

To these Iraqis, the debate over whether the war has been just or unjust, whether the blame lies with Saddam Hussein, or the Americans, or the insurgents, is a distant thing, carrying no promise of relief from their pain. Their faces, like their words, speak of what they have lost, but also, mutely, of their struggle to find new meaning in their lives, to fill the void that war's impact on noncombatants has always made of hope.

Face of Sacrifice in Iraq