War Victims

It took 12 years for Ojwang Santino to feel safe enough to begin rebuilding his home. Each morning before the sun gets too hot, he makes the trek to his ancestral land to smooth new mud walls and work on the thatched roof. But now he doesn't know whether he'll have the courage to move in. He's afraid the Lord's Resistance Army will come back. Santino, a father and grandfather, is one of the 1.

It was a voice of anguish that pierced a nation. Israeli TV broadcast a father's heartbreak Friday night when a Palestinian doctor living in Gaza made a frantic phone call to a newscaster saying an Israeli tank had shelled his home, killing three of his daughters and injuring other family members. Izz el-Deen Aboul Aish, who speaks Hebrew, worked as a gynecologist in an Israeli hospital.

Every day he scours the market for apples, okra, diapers; listening to the warnings of men with radios to their ears and the rumble of shells and missiles, a strange throb that plays through blackouts and prayers at the mosque until Yousif Nagla returns home. Death notices rattle on alley walls, replaced quickly by new ones. If he's lucky, on a good day, he can find oranges and thyme in the market, breathing in their scents like the times before the bomb craters and quickly dug graves.

She was a girl with cuts on her face, lying in a hospital bed near her mother. Hours earlier, before dawn in the Gaza Strip town of Khoza, the Israeli soldiers came and the firefights and shelling rattled and shook the darkness. Everyone without a gun scattered. Ambulances moved out to collect the wounded. Fourteen-year-old Alaa Khalid ran with her mother and brother to hide. There was a boom and she remembered nothing until she woke up in a bed at the Nasser Hospital.

This might be the unluckiest city in the world, a onetime resort playground for the wealthy doomed by a string of human and natural disasters that recall biblical scourges. Lobuta Colletta has borne witness to Goma's decline. First from a comfortable home and now from a cramped shack, the mother of eight has seen mass murder and cholera, volcanic eruptions and civil war. "This part of the country must be cursed," she says. The troubles are back.

For those at Loma Linda University who still haven't met the cheerful amputee tooling about campus in his wheelchair, he's made up business cards: "Visitor from Afghanistan Mohammad Malek," they say, followed by a Kabul phone number. Not that he really needs them. In recent months, Malek, who was first profiled in January by The Times, has been transformed from a frightened teenager in a broken body into a popular, confident young man, attending school, learning English and living independently.

After the gunfire and explosions, after the panicked flight to an unfamiliar town, the Kadims had one more shock in store: the homecoming. When the family of 12 returned to Hay Askari in mid-July, little remained of the prosperous market village they remembered from a year ago. Every facade had been sprayed with bullets. Entire blocks had been reduced to charred shells. In a daze, they picked out the place where their house had stood. All that remained was a pile of rubble. "We were all crying," said Salar Kadim, the head of the family.

They squat in abandoned buildings, crash in rickety schoolhouses or sleep under bushes and trees. They stumble into the city wooden-faced and traumatized, children in tow, with little or nothing but the clothes they were wearing when they fled their houses. Tens of thousands of Georgians have been forced from their homes by days of fighting and Russian occupation, leaving this small country suddenly swamped in a major humanitarian crisis.

When Maira Martinez graduated from college in Bogota, she had dreams of being a female Indiana Jones, excavating ancient burial sites and unlocking secrets to Colombia's rich pre-Hispanic past. These days, she's sifting through a much more recent, and grisly, past. The 27-year-old forensic anthropologist is a member of one of 12 exhumation teams working to recover and, they hope, identify the remains of thousands of victims of Colombia's civil war.

A pot of coffee brews inside the one-story home on Seth Dvorin Lane, as the father of a dead American soldier salutes his son's picture, and sets out to keep his memory alive another day. His one-level weathered home sits on a street named after Army 2nd Lt. Seth Dvorin, 24, killed by a roadside bomb near Iskandariyah, Iraq, on Feb. 3, 2004.