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Los Angeles Instances international correspondent and photojournalist Marcus Yam was awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking Information Images on Monday for his compelling protection of the autumn of Afghanistan to the Taliban. It’s outstanding that he gained journalism’s highest honor in his first yr as a international correspondent. This Pulitzer is the end result of all the good work Yam has produced over the past seven years on the Los Angeles Instances.
When the U.S. introduced that it will pull American troops out of Afghanistan, Yam believed this is able to not finish nicely and he wanted to be on the bottom overlaying it from starting to finish. We, in fact, agreed as a result of we trusted him and we knew he would produce stellar work.
Marcus Yam flying on an Afghan Air Drive UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter on a resupply mission in Gardez, Afghanistan, on Might 9, 2021.
(Nabih Bulos / Los Angeles Instances)
He arrived Aug. 14, 2021; the next day, Afghanistan fell to the Taliban inside hours, a lot to the shock of the world. However not for Yam, who not solely suspected this might need occurred however was already considering of what would come subsequent — the tales of the Afghan individuals affected by this takeover.
For the following two months, Yam courageously and relentlessly pursued various human curiosity tales at the same time as different Western information organizations exited the nation resulting from safety points. This was maybe the toughest and most disturbing time for me as a director of images. I fearful about his security day by day, as I’m certain many people within the newsroom did as nicely. When he was roughed up by the Taliban whereas overlaying a nationwide flag rally, a number of editors insisted that I get him out instantly for his personal security.
Every time I spoke to Yam about leaving, he’d at all times remind me this was an essential story that wanted to be instructed. He would guarantee me that he had two exit plans each day and that he was protected. In the end, after some backwards and forwards, he would persuade me to let him keep and maintain reporting. I’ve a deep respect and admiration for him, his work ethic, braveness and stoicism amid the risks and restrictions he confronted on the time. Not solely is it a testomony to the good photojournalist he’s however how fortunate we’re to have him right here on the L.A. Instances.
Regardless that this award is for his images, what was equally as spectacular was his skill to navigate the unknown. Yam turns into the sixth Los Angeles Instances journalist to win a Pulitzer for the images classes. He’s additionally the primary Malaysian-born journalist to ever win a Pulitzer for images.
A toddler cries as a person carries a bloodied baby on a highway resulting in Kabul’s airport. Others assist a wounded girl on the bottom in a scene of chaos because the Taliban secured its grip on the capital whereas tens of hundreds of Afghans raced to the airport, hoping to be evacuated on U.S. navy transport planes. Taliban fighters used gunfire, whips, sticks and sharp objects to violently rebuff hundreds of Afghans on Aug. 17, 2021. At the least a half dozen had been wounded, together with the lady and baby.
(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Instances)
Taliban fighters pray subsequent to younger Afghans outdoors a mosque for night prayers in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 26, 2021. In its practically two-decade battle with the U.S., the Taliban labored at each flip to undermine the Afghan authorities, deriding its leaders as corrupt stooges whose forces may by no means defend residents from the group’s ferocious assaults. However the Taliban is now in cost, and with energy comes a frightening problem: convincing Afghans, lots of them with bitter reminiscences of the final time the fundamentalist group ran the nation, that it will probably govern and police in addition to it will probably battle.
(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Instances)
Ladies and youngsters crouch within the sweltering warmth at a Taliban-controlled checkpoint close to Abbey Gate, an entrance to the Kabul airport, on Aug. 25, 2021. They wait to make their approach towards the British military-controlled entrance of the airport. Exterior the gates, the little bit of U.S.-held territory remaining within the nation, bedlam grew to become a day by day occasion. Even these with permission to depart confronted crushing crowds and uneasy Taliban fighters utilizing truncheons, sticks, whips, rifle butts and bullets to disperse individuals across the airport’s environs.
(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Instances)
Anti-Taliban protesters mark Afghanistan’s independence day by trying to hoist the purple, inexperienced and black nationwide banner. They had been usually crushed by militant fighters, who newly managed the streets of Kabul. About 200 individuals rallied towards town middle on Aug. 19, 2021, chanting “Loss of life to Pakistan, God bless Afghanistan, lengthy stay the nationwide flag of Afghanistan.”
(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Instances)
A wounded affected person lies within the restoration unit at Wazir Akbar Khan Hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 26, 2021. A suicide bomber from the terrorist group ISIS-Ok struck Kabul airport’s Abbey Gate entrance. The blast ripped by crowds of Afghans and international nationals. At the least 170 civilians had been killed along with 13 U.S. service personnel, and a minimum of 200 individuals had been wounded. The explosion difficult an already nightmarish airlift simply earlier than the U.S. deadline to take away its troops from the nation.
(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Instances)
Former Kabul Mayor Mohammad Daoud Sultanzoy, left, meets with new interim Mayor Hamdullah Namony on the Kabul Municipality workplace in Afghanistan on Aug. 28, 2021. “The management of the Taliban, most are of the age that, with out mentioning to them, they really feel the change in Kabul each day, as a result of they had been right here when it was inhabited by lower than 500,000 individuals,” stated Daoud Sultanzoy, Kabul’s 66-year-old mayor and one of many few prime officers from the bygone state to stay in his put up to ease the transition to interim Mayor Namony. He referred to the Taliban’s first foray as rulers in 1996, once they entered a capital so destroyed by civil struggle that “canine consuming corpses had been roaming the streets. Now they got here to a Kabul that was intact. With all of its flaws, it was a metropolis that had life, that was functioning, it had providers, markets, an economic system, so that they inherited a greater Kabul than they’d 25 years in the past.”
(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Instances)
Minibus passengers look on as Taliban troopers patrol a busy road in downtown Kabul on Aug. 26, 2021. Taliban fighters are the enforcers of Afghanistan’s new regulation and order, younger males keen to flee the mundane enterprise of governing and policing, who’re used to the depth of battle but in addition the simplicity of life within the rural provinces.
(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Instances)
Relations and neighbors of the Ahmadi household collect to look at the wreckage brought on by a missile launched from a U.S. drone that focused a car parked inside a residential compound within the Khwaja Burgha neighborhood in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 30, 2021. The U.S. navy says that the air strike was meant to focus on ISIS-Ok militants and retaliate for an airport bombing carried out by the phobia group. As an alternative, it took the lives of 10 civilians: members of Emal Ahmadi’s household, together with seven kids. The U.S. would ultimately name the strike a “tragic mistake.”
(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Instances)
A navy transport airplane departs overhead as Afghans hoping to depart the nation wait outdoors the Kabul airport on Aug. 23, 2021. Because the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan earlier in August, greater than 120,000 individuals had been airlifted out of Afghanistan in one of many largest mass evacuations in U.S. historical past.
(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Instances)
Mourners at a mass funeral lookup and weep because the roar of jet engines drowns out their wails in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 30, 2021. Fighter jets circled the hilltop cemetery the place members of the Ahmadi household had been burying 10 of their very own, seven of them kids, all victims of a U.S. drone strike. A full day earlier than the U.S. navy withdrawal approached its conclusion, loss of life continued to hang-out the war-torn nation. The airstrike got here within the wake of an airport bombing on Aug. 26 carried out by ISIS-Ok militants. The U.S. navy claimed initially that it was concentrating on an alleged Islamic extremist who posed the specter of finishing up the same assault. A month later, it reversed its place, however the Pentagon determined no American troops could be punished. Left to grieve and marvel, Emal Ahmadi couldn’t perceive the way it may very well be {that a} household may die and nobody be held accountable.
(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Instances)
Visiting for the primary time because the Taliban took over the nation, Laila Haidari weeps as she surveys the dismantling of what had been a “sacred place” for her: Taj Begum, a shabby-chic Puli Surkh neighborhood in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Sept. 20, 2021. However fearing the Taliban’s wrath, Haidari shut down her cafe in August. The cafe, a fulcrum of Kabul’s cultural life, is a casualty of the brand new order ushered in by the Taliban. “It was the place ladies, with all their wounds, may come and communicate with us, and communicate with one another. It gave individuals their lives again; it touched so many individuals,” stated Haidari, her voice holding again sobs. “Taj Begum wasn’t only a restaurant or a enterprise to me. It was like a cinema, a theater, a spot the place women and men may sing collectively.”
(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Instances)
Afghans clamor to greet Khalil Rahman Haqqani, a senior member of the Haqqani community, after he delivered a sermon for the primary Friday prayers underneath Taliban rule on the Pul-i-Khishti Mosque in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 20, 2021. The Haqqani community is a Taliban splinter group thought of a terrorist group by the US and is without doubt one of the fiercest foes American forces spent twenty years making an attempt to conquer in Afghanistan. Flanked by armed guards, Haqqani cradled a rifle: an American-made M-4 carbine. From the pulpit, he delivered a message that was by turns reassuring and menacing: Life underneath the Taliban could be totally different from that underneath the deposed nationwide rulers he derided as weak and corrupt. “Now we have freed Afghanistan from Western imperialism and the infidels. Afghanistan will now be a peaceable and affluent nation, the place there will probably be safety, no corruption, and no theft,” he stated. The entire nation’s numerous ethnicities and factions, he added, had been “brothers.”
(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Instances)
After the stroke of midnight, Taliban fighters from the Fateh Zwak unit storm into Hamid Karzai Worldwide Airport whereas sporting American-made uniforms and brandishing American M4 and M16 rifles and using U.S. pickup vehicles on Aug. 31, 2021. For 2 weeks, Kabul’s airport was the final tether to America’s management in Afghanistan, its runways the positioning of a frantic airlift that spirited greater than 120,000 individuals overseas. However there was no extra of that frenzied exercise on the deadline of the U.S. withdrawal, hours after the final U.S. navy transport airplane rumbled into the evening sky, closing the chapter on a 20-year U.S. intervention that ended the way in which it started: with the Taliban in charge of Afghanistan.
(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Instances)
Journalists from the Etilaat Roz newspaper, Nemat Naqdi, 28, left, and Taqi Daryabi, 22, undress to point out their wounds brought on by beatings from Taliban fighters in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Sept. 8, 2021. The 2 had been tortured whereas in custody after being arrested for filming a rally for ladies’s rights. The demonstrations got here simply at some point after the Taliban revealed an all-male interim authorities made up of stalwarts with zero illustration for ladies or ethnic minority teams, their promise of a extra tolerant rule clearly damaged. “They didn’t let me resist,” Daryabi stated of the brutality he and his colleague suffered. He stated he was shoved to the bottom, tortured and crushed unconscious. He was taken to a yard and water was poured on him. He was nonetheless there once they introduced Naqdi. “We had been shouting that we’re journalists. However they didn’t care,” Naqdi stated. “I believed they had been going to kill me…They saved on ridiculing us, asking if we had been filming them.”
(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Instances)
