Early reports indicated that the heaviest damage was sustained by the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a region already ravaged by extensive war and extreme poverty.

Today's death leaves Serbia, a struggling country at the center of a conflict-ridden region ravaged by a decade of war, with neither a prime minister nor an elected president.

Tomislav's family is among the first to return to this once-prosperous region in central Croatia ravaged by the fighting between Serbs and Croats last year.

The smallest crimes have provoked the most violent deaths in countless villages like this one, where the end of Guatemala's 36-year civil war has brought neither law nor order to remote regions most ravaged by the conflict.

To the contrary, General Powell suggested that the initial deployment of 28,000 troops was based on plans to impose order and distribute relief supplies only in southern Somalia, the region most ravaged by famine and strife among warring clans.

On a flight Friday to the northeastern region ravaged by earthquakes and flooding nine days ago, President Leon Febres Cordero described a country beset by unending tragedies in the last four years.

At the end of the thirteenth century a young monk of the monastery, Hylarion, sent to Elegmoi in Bythinia to look after the possessions of the monastery, found the region ravaged by the Turks.

The experience of the United Nations team underlines the increasingly difficult and perilous task that human rights investigators face in gathering scientific and legal evidence in regions ravaged by civil war.

The quake struck in South Ossetia, a region ravaged by battles - political and physical - for control between Ossetians, who want independence from the Georgian authorities who administer their territory, and the Georgians.

Mr. Erkel, a 33-year-old Dutch citizen who was leading an effort to provide medical services and other assistance in a region ravaged by war and terror, was seized and driven away by three gunmen.