By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, May 31, 2003; Page A14

BAGHDAD -- Since U.S. forces ended their sprint up the Iraqi desert with a violent pass through her quiet Baghdad neighborhood, Dina Sarhan has begun a new life learning to make do.

Since she can no longer climb stairs, she has restricted herself to coasting among the first-floor rooms where her life changed suddenly in a moment of war. She has taken to sleeping in the dining room, where the pink-and-white checked bedspread is out of place among the high-back chairs and china cabinet.

What the family and people who witnessed the fighting say was a fragment from a U.S. tank round smashed though the front door on the night of April 10 and into Sarhan's left leg, leaving it a tangle of exposed muscle and bone. Doctors removed much of the leg. The amputation saved her life, leading Sarhan, 22, to write poems of thanks to her surgeons. But now she has been consigned to a wheel chair.

Never a supporter of the U.S. invasion, Sarhan has nonetheless forgiven the anonymous soldiers who injured her in pursuit of an enemy adept at using civilians as cover. Now she wants help from the United States in finding a prosthetic leg. But she has been told during visits from U.S. military officials and an army chaplain that none will be forthcoming. "They told me, 'We don't have anything for you right now. It's up to a higher authority.' "

The stub where her leg was still tingles from time to time. "I knew they would hurt us," she said. "Mr. Bush said this would be a clean war. Is this a clean war?"

Sarhan is one of thousands of Iraqis who embody the collateral damage of that war, described by the Bush administration as a means of liberating the country from former president Saddam Hussein.

To many who lost livelihoods and limbs in the process, a U.S. reconstruction effort in its seventh week should be as much about recompense as restarting electrical grids, pumping stations and a flattened economy. But U.S. officials have made clear to Iraqis that they do not intend to conduct a complete accounting of war damages, nor compensate those who say the occupying army owes them something. While sympathetic to individual hardships suffered as a result of war, U.S. officials say they are wary of beginning a legal process that could entail millions of claims against them.

U.S. officials have approached the issue in much the way they did in Afghanistan, presenting Washington's multibillion-dollar commitment to rebuilding Iraq as compensation enough. But international relief organizations, including the Islamic Red Crescent Society, say the conventions of war hold the United States responsible for paying out such claims.

"The other thing that makes this difficult is the endemic fraud that would creep into this," said John Kincannon, a spokesman for the Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance that is overseeing the civilian part of the postwar occupation. "How do you ascertain facts three months after the incident, for example? And once word gets out that the Americans are paying people for damages, where does it stop?"

Groups of Iraqis gather daily outside the palace compound being used by the U.S. occupation authority, clutching receipts, letters and other personal appeals for help. They can be found lingering outside virtually any public event featuring a senior U.S. official. In most cases, they seek a few thousand dollars to get lives running again.

Like Abdul Kareem Salman, however, most of them find no place to turn.

"Kareem Service Station Had Been Ruined In The War," reads the sign that hangs outside the rubble-lined lot where his garage once stood. Salman said he wrote the sign in English in the hopes that a U.S. official might happen by and take an interest in his case.

Despite his objections, Iraqi military officials parked a truck carrying an anti-aircraft gun on his lot before the war. He returned after Baghdad fell to find his business in ruins, by all appearances the result of an airstrike that left neighboring buildings intact.

Under a drizzling sky Friday, Salman said he needed $20,000 to rebuild the garage. Behind him his 18 employees poured concrete and cleared debris, work financed by $4,000 drawn from his now-exhausted savings. He has appealed to family members for the rest after a fruitless visit to U.S. occupation authorities seeking help.

"They told me a committee was assessing this and that I needed to go to the Sheraton Hotel," he said. "I arrived and asked a soldier about the committee and he told me there is no such thing, go to the Red Cross. I went to the Red Cross and they said they had nothing to do with anything like this."

Sarhan's hopes now rest with the Italian Red Cross, which operates a medical center in a collection of green army tents near downtown Baghdad. The ward was bustling this morning with recent victims, mostly children and adolescents suffering burns and other injuries as the result of unexploded ordnance.

Cosimo Prete, one of 10 Italian doctors working at the center, examined Sarhan two days ago. He was trying to find her room on one of the agency's weekly charter flights for Milan, where she could be fitted for a leg. He flipped open a green folder on his desk thick with papers, a waiting list.

"There is a problem and a hope with her case," Prete said. "She is not dying, and you can see we have some very bad cases. But I am hoping for next week."