Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigators Friday executed search warrants at the headquarters of multinational engineering giant SNC-Lavalin in Montreal, which has been under scrutiny for its ties to the deposed Libyan regime of Moamer Gaddafi.

On November 11, 2001, I survived an ambush that killed three of my colleagues. Johanne Sutton, Pierre Billaud and Volker Handloik were killed when the group of Northern Alliance soldiers we were traveling with was ambushed by Taliban fighters on a barren plateau near Dasht-e-Qala in Takhar Province, in northeastern Afghanistan. Jo, Pierre and Volker were the first journalists to be killed in that war. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, since September 2001 13 foreign journalists and six Afghan reporters have been killed in Afghanistan. This is the dispatch I filed to the Montreal Gazette on the following day, on November 12 (on my birthday) 2001. CHAGHATAY, Afghanistan – Johanne’s bullet-riddled body lay…

Joelie Sanguya raised his axe, paused for a moment, then with a swift blow swung it at the frozen seal carcass.

Behind him a chorus of hungry sled dogs filled the arctic air with a cacophony of excited howling and barking in anticipation of a well-deserved dinner.

Lt. Chantal Tétreault stood in the crew commander’s hatch of her Bison light armoured vehicle surveying the dusty road ahead. She gripped the handle of a loaded machine gun, ready to fire. From hatches behind her, two Canadian soldiers scanned the nearby fields and the village’s mudcaked walls, their fingers tense on the trigger guards of their rifles.

Reader’s Digest By Levon Sevunts July 2005 Hawa Bashi was sure that her son, Hari, would die soon. An emaciated two-year-old with the resigned gaze of a life-weary elder, Hari had lost his appetite. Even worse, he seemed to have lost the will to live. His bone-thin legs could no longer hold him up; his mother had to hold him as Hari sat slumped under the shade of a thorny tree near the village of Shegek Karo. Bashi’s own village, Bashimi, just a few kilometres from here, had been bombed, looted and burned in the summer of 2003 by the Sudanese army and the mounted Janjaweed militia, which the government of Sudan has employed to…

In 2005, I returned to Afghanistan as a freelance correspondent embedded with U.S. and Canadian troops and as an independent reporter. I spent time with U.S. soldiers in Eastern Afghanistan, along the border with Pakistan, as well as Canadian soldiers then stationed in Kabul.

Montreal Gazette Sunday, November 11, 2001 Page: A1 / FRONT Section: News Byline: LEVON SEVUNTS Column: Levon Sevunts in Afghanistan Dateline: PUZE PULEKHOMRY, Afghanistan Source: The Gazette Anti-Taliban forces launched a ground offensive assisted by U.S. air strikes on the strategic Kala Kata hill in northern Afghanistan yesterday. The Taliban responded by sending salvos of Katusha rockets at the village of Dasht-e Qala. One rocket landed on a shop on the main road, killing one rebel soldier and injuring two civilians who were watching the U.S. planes overhead. “I don’t know what is our sin,” said Khaldarbek, looking at a bloody foot in a brand-new army boot lying in blood- caked dust. His son, a…

These images were taken in refugee camps in Eastern Chad and in rebel-held Darfur, in Western Sudan in August 2004. About 300,000 people have died from the combined effects of war, hunger and disease, as the government in Khartoum tries to quell the insurgency in Darfur. The United Nations says more than 2.7 million people have fled their homes and now live in camps near Darfur’s main towns. Some 200,000 people have also sought safety in neighbouring Chad. Many of these are camped along a 600km (372 mile) stretch of the border and remain vulnerable to attacks from the Sudan side.