A rebel fighter celebrates as his comrades fire a barrage of rockets toward troops loyal to Libyan ruler Muammar Qaddafi. The two sides exchanged fire on April 14 in this coastal town, just south of the opposition stronghold, Benghazi.

On April 20, scenes of terror characterized this besieged town, which was become the focal point of the stand-off between rebel forces and loyalists of Muammar al-Qaddafi. Rebel troops assaulted positions of the Qaddafi forces, forcing them back over a key bridge. Several loyalists were trapped in this building on their retreat; rather than surrendering, they fired back against the rebels, like the one pictured here, injuring several.

Shrapnel blasted through a hospital window on April 18, wounding the baby held by a woman here. Thousands of civilians are trapped in Misrata as fighting continues; nowhere is safe from the heavy artillery used by Qaddafi forces to bombard the city.

Rebel fighters carry a fallen comrade, injured in an effort to dislodge Qaddafi loyalists from a building on Tripoli Street in downtown Misrata.

An anti-government protester stands on the edge a building overlooking Tahrir Square, where fellow demonstrators camped out for weeks demanding the ousting of  Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. On Feb. 5, rain fell on the protestors, who huddled below.

A paratrooper in the 4th Brigade of the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division sleeps on a cot in a field before dawn June 22, 2010 in Khushi Khona, Afghanistan. His American colleagues, together with Italian troops, have been working for nearly a year to pacify the northern reaches of Herat Province near the Turkmenistan border, where ancient villages dot the land just north of the cosmopolitan city of Herat.

On June 29, 2010, village elders await the start of a shura meeting, a local consultation with the local Afghan government officials and officers from the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division. Bala Murghad is one of many small villages in this rural area, rife with Taliban insurgents.

To see more of Chris Hondros's photos of Afghanistan, click here.

Just days after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake flattened the impoverished Caribbean country of Haiti in January 2010, United Nations peacekeepers from Uruguay tend to a pregnant Haitian woman who lost consciousness in a massive crowd who were awaiting a rice distribution. The capital of Port-au-Prince remained a humanitarian disaster zone.

Read "I Am So Happy He's Not Dead," Chris Hondros's 2010 photo-essay dispatch from Haiti.

A boy tries to salvage school supplies in the rubble of a primary classroom on Jan. 26, 2010. The historic town of Legoane was near the epicenter of the 7.0 earthquake, that displaced millions and killed an estimated at 316,000.

Firefighters work to put out the remainders of a three-alarm fire that broke out at 502 East 14th Street, in lower Manhattan on May 12, 2010. The blaze, believed to be started in Pete's-a-Place pizza restaurant, damaged at least three other businesses; hundreds of firefighters worked for hours to extinguish it.

Job-seekers line up for a career fair in New York City on April 14, 2009. The line began to form three hours before the event opened, a sign of the desperate unemployment situation in a city hit hard by financial crisis.

At 4:20 pm on the date that bears the same dateline -- 4/20, or April 20 -- the haze of marijuana smoke looms over a crowd of thousands at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The date has become a de facto holiday for marijuana advocates, like those seen here; Colorado was one of just 14 states to have legalized medical use of the substance by 2010.

Head of U.S. Central Command, General David Petraeus, poses for a portrait May 24, 2009 in Prague, Czech Republic.

On June 11, 2005, a newly trained Iraqi soldier holds his weapon on his shoulders during a drill in East Fallujah Iraqi Camp, a base for recruits of the Iraqi armed forces. Marines in and attached to the Second Marine Expeditionary Force served as instructors.

Speaking through a translator, an Iraqi woman answers questions from a U.S. Marines involved in counterinsurgency operations outside Fallujah on June 19, 2005. Marines found neither weapons nor evidence of the insurgency at the house and continued on.

A man crosses the main bridge, where infamously brutal clashes took place at the end of the country's long civil war in 2003. Now to years later, Oct. 5, 2005, Liberia is just days away from its first post-war democratic elections.

A Liberian militia commander, loyal to the country's government, exults after firing a rocket-propelled grenade at rebel forces near a key strategic bridge in Monrovia on July 20, 2003, preventing the violence from reaching the capital's center.

A Liberian boy, displaced from home in conflict, walks down the center line of a main Monrovian street on July 15, 2003, just outside a refugee camp in Monrovia. Hundreds of thousands of Liberians converged onto the capital,  fleeing fighting in the bush. Their influx exacerbated a health and sanitation nightmare in the city, which lacks electricity and a water system.

Staff Sgt. Don Davis of the Oklahoma National Guard looks into a house in New Orleans Sept. 7, 2005, searching for remaining survivors of Hurricane Katrina.

A week after Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf coast, residents like Jorge Abarca, of Metairie, Louisiana, were allowed home to collect their belongings. Authorities discouraged them from returning to stay.

U.S. Senator John Kerry enters his chartered jet at Nashville Airport on Feb. 7, 2003 during a campaign tour for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Men get their heads shaved during a St. Baldrick's Day event at Jim Brady's Pub March 17, 2004 in New York City. 

The body of an 18-year-old girl who was struck and killed by a stray bullet, is zipped into a body bag July 29, 2003 in Monrovia, Liberia.

Government militiamen duck incoming rebel fire at a key bridge in Monrovia, Liberia on July 25, 2003. The rebels swept across the country and reached the capital in early summer, where they met resistance from national troops.

An Iraqi Christian boy looks back from the pews during mass at Our Lady the Savior Catholic church in Baghdad on Dec. 25, 2003.

An Iraqi informer, who provided outdated intelligence to U.S. troops, crouches toward the ground in Sammara, Iraq, on Dec. 19, 2003, his name inked in English across his back.

American troops line up suspected insurgents just before dawn on Dec. 3, 2003 in Sammara, Iraq.

An Amish family rides in a horse-drawn cart in Bird in Hand, Pennsylvania on Oct. 23, 2003.

A man walks along a snowy bank adjacent to houseboats on Jan. 17, 2002, a week that saw record snowfall in Srinagar, India.

An Indian Border Security Force officer enters a Muslim house in Srinagar, India, as the owner is questioned on Jan. 15, 2002. The soldiers periodically conduct random searches of houses in the Muslim-majority city, hunting separatist militants who have been fighting against the Indian government since 1989.

Anti-Taliban soldiers listen for news from the front on Dec. 10, 2001 in Tora Bora, Afghanistan. During what would later become an infamous battle, anti-Taliban soldiers bombed and fought al Qaeda fighters but failed to catch leader Osama bin Laden, who remains at large.

Villagers from Hosa-Khel inspect a bomb crater in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, Dec. 14, 2001, after a U.S.-led bombing campaign attempted to root out Osama bin Laden from the area's rugged mountainside caves.

Mourners assemble at a candlelight vigil in Washington Square Park in New York City on Sept. 14, 2001, three days after the Sept. 11 attacks.

An empty New York subway car's destination reads "World Trade Center" at the West 4th Street station on Sept. 12, 2001, one day after the twin towers collapsed.

New York City firefighters look at the destroyed arcade of the World Trade Center on Sept. 13, 2001, two days after the twin towers were destroyed when two hit by two hijacked passenger jets. (left)

A New York City firefighter sleeps after an all-night shift at ground zero of the World Trade Center Sept. 13, 2001 in New York City, two days after the twin towers were destroyed when two hit by two hijacked passenger jets. (right)

New York City police officers gather at the wreckage of the World Trade Center two days after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Smoke pours from the former site of the World Trade Center, spreading throughout Manhattan well into the following day, Sept. 12, 2001.

Bystanders hi-five a New York City Marathon runner on Nov. 5, 2000.

Officers in the Kosovo Liberation Army, a guerilla army set up by ethnic Albanians to resist the Serbian army, dress up a young boy as a soldier and give him a gun at a rally in February 1999.

Fourteen-year-old Shefkije Morina sits amid the tents in Cegrane, Macedonia, where hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians fled in 1999, chased out by the Serbian military.

A nun conducts the choir during a service in a Catholic church in September, 1999 in Malange, Angola. Malange, a rural town surrounded by rebels in Angola's three-decades-long civil war, served as a haven for refugees fleeing atrocities in the bush.

More from

The World in Photos This Week

Rock the Vote

Face Off

Preparing for a Very Cold War