BAGHDAD, Iraq — On a steamy June morning two years ago, a U.S. soldier's warning shot ricocheted off a sand berm and blew a hole in Raez Habib's life.

The stray bullet plowed through his left thigh and shattered his right femur, leaving him bleeding in the street, Habib recalled in a recent interview. A helicopter took him to a military hospital, where doctors amputated his right leg four inches below the hip.

The shooting was an accident, a tragic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, according to Habib and to written statements from four U.S. service members who were at or near the scene that Habib keeps in a tattered manila folder. He soon lost his job as a builder, because he could no longer carry heavy loads, and moved his family into his mother's three-room clay house.

Deaf since birth, Habib, 35, communicates through muffled groans and hand signals. "I have a wife and three children and no way to provide for them," he said, his fingers clenching the fabric of his long white robe as his younger brother Ghassan translated.

"We don't think about who to blame. It was his destiny," Ghassan Habib said. "It happened. We take care of him. That is all."

The U.S. military keeps a meticulous tally of its wounded — 12,762 in Iraq as of Wednesday, along with 1,658 dead. Scenes of soldiers convalescing at well-equipped hospitals such as Washington's Walter Reed Army Medical Center are familiar symbols of the human cost of the war.

But more than two years after the U.S.-led invasion, little data is available on the far greater number of Iraqi civilians wounded in the invasion and subsequent violence related to the insurgency. And few of the victims' stories have been widely reported.

Little help available

While attacks on civilians are increasing, the wounded are getting little help from overburdened medical facilities, according to interviews with more than a dozen patients, physicians and health officials in Baghdad. The best rehabilitation hospital in the Iraqi capital is running out of artificial limbs and might soon close, its director said. And most of the wounded fall back on the only support network they have: their families.

Attempts to quantify civilian casualties here have largely focused on the number of dead, not the wounded. A widely criticized study released in October by an international group of university professors estimated that the invasion had caused 100,000 civilian deaths. According to the group Iraq Body Count, which surveys news stories, at least 21,940 civilians have been reported killed since the war began in March 2003. Iraq Body Count does not track the number of wounded.

Iraq's Interior Ministry yesterday put the first official count on the number of civilians killed by insurgents: 12,000 in the past 18 months. That number does not include the full war or the civilians killed in military action.

After a long period of not reporting casualty figures, the Iraqi Health Ministry said Wednesday that 775 civilians were wounded in May, compared with 598 in April.

Many of the most seriously injured end up at the Rehabilitation and Rheumatological Center, on a leafy campus in northern Baghdad. A decade ago, most of its patients suffered from polio, vascular disorders or such diseases as diabetes that sometimes require amputations, according to its director, Emad Khudair. Today, more than two-thirds are trauma patients, he said.

At the rear of the facility is the rehabilitation center and prosthetics workshop, where Thamir Aziz, a physician, oversees about 40 technicians who craft arms and legs out of aluminum, plaster and polypropylene. His warehouse's shelves are stocked with artificial body parts: hands and feet of varying sizes, titanium knee and elbow joints, and aluminum shafts that will become limbs.

"Most of our equipment was looted during the invasion, so we do the best we can with what we have," Aziz said. "We have pages and pages of people waiting for prosthetics, most for at least five months."

For almost two years, the facility and Iraq's Health Ministry have been unable to import raw materials and manufactured parts for prosthetics from the French and German companies that make them, Khudair said.

Some doctors blame a financial dispute with the companies over an order that did not meet specifications. Others, privately, blame government corruption or say it has become much more difficult to obtain technical equipment because most humanitarian-aid organizations have withdrawn from Iraq, concerned about the security risk.

In a rehabilitation room, Ali Majeed grimaced each time he shifted weight from his sinewy left leg to the aluminum and plastic prosthesis that runs between his right hip and the ground. He paused to catch his breath, his arms draped over a pair of metal railings, as a hospital technician helped him shuffle a few more steps.

Majeed, 40, said he was carrying a bag of groceries home in the Baghdad neighborhood of Shuhada last October when a gunman in a passing car sprayed his lower body with bullets.

"I don't have a problem with anybody, so I don't know why it happened," he said. "But the situation in this country makes you exposed to danger, even if you are just out for a walk near your home. You hear shooting wherever you go."

He and his family recently moved in with his wife's parents. "People help us. Our relatives help us. But I used to live in my own house," he said. "I am a different person now. To think I can't help my family or be there for them troubles me always. There is a lot of pressure in depending on other people."

Attacks targeting civilians have increased more than fourfold in the past month, Iraqi Defense Minister Sadoun Dulaimi said last week. U.S. and Iraqi officials have argued that the increase, and a decrease in attacks on so-called hard targets such as security forces, show that the insurgency is weakening.

Insurgents weakening?

"When the terrorists lost their ability to target Iraqi and coalition forces, they headed toward civilians," Dulaimi said. "This indicates their weakness and says they are losing."

Almost two years after being struck by the warning shot, Habib is still waiting for a prosthetic limb. He got one two months ago, he said, but returned it because the knee joint did not bend properly.

For many months after the shooting, which took place near the city of Balad, about 50 miles north of Baghdad, his family asked the U.S. military for financial help but was rejected several times, Ghassan Habib said. The military here pays restitution to the families of those deemed mistakenly killed or wounded by U.S. forces.

Washington Post correspondents Bassam Sebti and Falah Hasan contributed to this report.