This Sunday's reading from the Book of Revelation speaks of "the ones who have survived the time of great distress." The longstanding wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as their impact on Pakistan, the United States, and Western allies, have brought great distress in their wake. This past week has been exceptionally violent, with massive suicide bombings in Iraq and Pakistan and high U.S. and United Nations casualties in Afghanistan.

On Sunday a pair of suicide car bombings devastated the heart of Iraq's capital, Baghdad, killing at least 147 people in the country's deadliest attack in more than two years. The bombs targeted two government buildings and called into question Iraq's ability to protect its people as U.S. forces withdraw.

Two helicopter crashes in Afghanistan killed 14 Americans on Monday, the bloodiest single day for U.S. casualties in more than four years. And Tuesday, October became the deadliest month for U.S. troops in the eight-year-old Afghan war when two bombs killed eight soldiers and an interpreter in separate attacks.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon condemned as "despicable and brutal" an attack on a U.N. guest house in the Afghan capital of Kabul by Taliban militants wearing suicide vests and police uniforms. The attack killed 11 people, including five U.N. staff.

It was the biggest in a series of attacks in the capital Wednesday intended to undermine next month's presidential runoff election. The attack on the guesthouse was the worst on the U.N. in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban regime.

The chief of the U.N. mission in Afghanistan, Kai Eide, said the attack "will not deter the U.N. from continuing all its work" in the country. One of the dead was an American, the U.S. embassy said.

Also on Wednesday a car bomb struck a busy market in the city of Peshawar in northwestern Pakistan, killing at least 100 people--mostly women and children. The Pakistani government blamed militants seeking to avenge an army offensive launched this month against al-Qaida and the Taliban in their stronghold close to the Afghan border.

Source: Articles by Riaz Khan, Rahim Faiez, and Amir Shah for the Associated Press,
Joshua Partlow for the Washington Post, BBC News, and CBS News