I’m not particularly a war photographer. However, my reporting has taken me into the middle of war many times.
I based myself in Iraq for three years as a freelance reporter after the fall of Baghdad. During my eight years as a news photographer for Reuters News Agency, I was twice embedded with US Marines in Afghanistan and documented the uprisings in Libya and Syria during the Arab Spring. Turning freelancer in 2016, I covered the conflict between forces fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. I also travelled to multiple cities in Yemen to photograph the two warring factions amid the civil war.
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From my Cairo base, I have visited Yemen a few times since 2016, reporting on the civil war between its internationally recognised government, backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and the Houthi militia, a religious and political movement alleged to be receiving military support from Iran.
When I started to go to Yemen, I remember telling a friend, an American photographer based in Egypt, of my plan. He said, “Good luck, it’s all yours.” I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then I started to notice how only a small number of foreign journalists were keen to report on Yemen, despite the staggering scale of the war over the last decade.
Western news media call the conflict in Yemen (if they mention it at all) an ‘invisible war’ or ‘forgotten war’. I always wondered if this is because the foreign media neglected the proxy conflict on purpose, or if foreign journalists worry about being kidnapped as al-Qaeda members were still active, or because there was more attention given to other conflicts over the last decade, like the war in Syria, ISIS or, more recently, Ukraine.
