Even over short distances, American Black Hawk helicopters were the preferred transport in southern Afghanistan where insurgents' improvised explosive devices made road travel a gamble.

Driving the the ring road joining Afghanistan's main cities was a treacherous, bone-rattling ride through some of the country's most dangerous territories.

Aleppo, Syria

Using heavy equipment and their bare hands, Syrians in Aleppo frantically searched for the dead and wounded after President Bashar al-Assad's forces flattened an apartment building.

A Syrian opposition member pleads for more help from shocked onlookers in the scramble to save the wounded trapped in the rubble of an apartment building bombed by President Bashar al-Assad's forces.

U.S.-led bombing wiped out a flock of sheep in this northern Iraq village in the war to remove dictator Saddam Hussein.

A victim of Somalia's famine struggles for his last breaths in Baidoa.

Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge killers kept meticulous records of the genocide, including haunting head shots that greet visitors to the Tuol Sleng prison where many died, which is now a museum.

Girls have to grow up fast in southern Afghanistan, where they mind siblings outside the house because mothers have to stay inside. 

An anti-Assad guerrilla fighter, his assault rifle held together with packing tape, heads back to the front line in the Syrian city of Aleppo after gassing up a rickety motorbike with black market fuel.