A man takes a photo of a mural entitled “Thank goodness Silvia is here” (Meno male che Silvia c'è), representing former Italian prime minister and presidential candidate Silvio Berlusconi dressed as a woman, by Italian street artist Salvatore Benintende aka TvBoy, on January 21, 2022 in Milan. (Photo by Piero Cruciatti/AFP Photo)

Throughout the course of the long war in Afghanistan, Coalition troops have relied on thousands of military working dogs to help keep them safe, and make their jobs easier. The dogs are trained to detect explosives, to find illegal drugs, to search for missing comrades, or target enemy combatants. Not only are they active on the front lines, but behind the lines they serve as therapy dogs, service dogs, and loyal companions. They also share the same risks as the ground troops, suffering injuries and sometimes death on the battlefields. Gathered here are images of these dogs and their handlers in Afghanistan and back home, from over the past several years, part of the ongoing series here on Afghanistan.

#1: Superman. According to McAfee, 16.50% of Web searches for Superman led to sites with viruses and other malicious software. Pictured here: The Superman costume that was worn by Christopher Reeve in “Superman: The Movie” on display at Profiles In History in Calabasas, northwest of downtown Los Angeles, on July 19, 2012 in California. (Photo by Frederic J. Brown/AFP Photo)

Drastic inequality is by no means new in New York. Jacob A. Riis was called a muckraker after he chose to spotlight the city’s poverty at the turn of the 20th century by photographing it. Here: Sweatshop in Hester Street, 1889-1890. (Photo by Jacob A. Riis/Museum of the City of New York, Gift of Roger William Riis)

In this April 20, 2018, file aerial photo released by China's Xinhua News Agency, advection fog drifts across skyscrapers on the waterfront in Qingdao in eastern China's Shandong Province. Chinese leaders have long been sensitive about their communist country’s international image. Now, they are battling back, investing in diplomacy and a courtship of hearts and minds, just as the United States digs in on the Trump administration’s “America First” mindset. (Photo by Lu Hui/Xinhua via AP Photo/File)

These pictures reveal the crumbling ruins of the famed Grand Orient Express, now hollowed-out and almost reduced to rubble. There are only a couple of the trains, launched in 1883, left in the world. This example stands dormant in Belgium, untouched from its last voyage in the winter of 2009. Rusty ceilings, moth-eaten seats and tattered floors capture its level of decay. A Rotterdam-based urban photographer Brian Romeijn managed to snap these pictures while exploring the area. (Photo by Brian Romeijn/IMP Features)

A year after hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees snaked their way across southeastern Europe and onto television screens worldwide, the roads through the Balkans are now clear, depriving an arguably worsening tragedy of its poignant visibility. Reuters photographer, Antonio Bronic revisiting the people-packed locations where he and his colleagues captured last year's diaspora, found empty roads, unencumbered railway tracks and bucolic countryside. (Photo by Antonio Bronic/Reuters)

An orphaned giraffe nuzzling a wildlife keeper at Sarara camp in Kenya, one of 70 pictures being sold by Prints for Nature (printsfornature.com) to raise money for work by the Conservation International charity. This giraffe was rehabilitated and returned to the wild, as a number of others have done before him. Right now, giraffe are undergoing what has been referred to as a silent extinction. Current estimates are that giraffe populations across Africa have dropped 40 percent in three decades, plummeting from approximately 155,000 in the late 1980s to under 100,000 today. (Photo by Ami Vitale/National Geographic)