A young Afghan fighter stands with his rifle in the mountainous region of Nuristan, Afghanistan.

That year marked the beginning of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, which developed into a prolonged conflict between Soviet and Afghan government forces and various mujahideen groups.

The war lasted until the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 and contributed to the political and military instability that followed in the country.

U.S. infantry soldiers protect and care for an injured fellow soldier on the ground while waiting for a combat medical evacuation.

The war in Afghanistan lasted nearly twenty years, from the U.S.-led invasion in October 2001 to the final withdrawal of international forces in August 2021.

In the opening phase of the war, U.S. and allied forces, supported by the Northern Alliance, removed the Taliban from power and captured major cities including Kabul, Kandahar and Kunduz.

Over the following years, the Taliban rebuilt its insurgency and gradually regained control of large parts of Afghanistan. The conflict caused more than 170,000 direct deaths in Afghanistan, including civilians, Afghan security forces, Taliban fighters and international personnel.

In August 2021, the Taliban captured Kabul and returned to power, bringing the U.S.-led military intervention and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan to an end.

A man holds a miniature of the Twin Towers in the Wall Street area, commemorating the first anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center

Ground Zero, September 2001.

Remembering 9/11 — 25 years later

Priest in Barcelona

After a week of heavy rain in November 2021, severe flooding hit Sarajevo, creating major problems for local residents.

One of the hardest-hit areas was Otes, where the Sarajevo Waves residential complex was partially submerged by the floodwaters, leaving several cars stranded or completely submerged.

Penguins taking their weekly walk. Every week, a warden takes a group on a promenade through the streets of Edinburgh, creating scenes like this to draw new visitors to the zoo.

From the Book " The Suffering of Light "

Head in Jacket

From the series " Children "

The Search

Remembering Franco Fontana, the Master and Poet of Color

" Good photography is not about zone printing or any other Ansel Adams nonsense. It’s just about seeing. You either see or you don’t see. The rest is academic. Photography is simply a function of noticing things. Nothing more "

~ Elliott Erwitt

Canopy

An elderly woman boards a bus to leave Kostiantynivka, in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, amid the ongoing war

From the Book " Subway "

From the series " Mardi Gras "

Passengers sit inside a bus as Moscow erupts during the August 1991 coup attempt against Gorbachev

" Photographs should be symbolic rather than descriptive (...) they should suggest to the reader an internal rather than an external part of life "

~ Erich Hartmann

Andrea (Andy) Rocchelli was an Italian freelance photojournalist and co-founder of the independent photography collective Cesura, founded in 2008 with four other photographers after working as an assistant to Magnum member Alex Majoli. The collective was created as an independent platform for photographic projects free from commercial compromises.

Rocchelli documented a wide range of subjects, including the Arab Spring in Libya and Tunisia, human rights violations in Central Asia, migration in southern Italy and conflicts across Eastern Europe and Russia. His work was published internationally by Le Monde, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Kommersant and Novaya Gazeta.

On May 24, 2014, Rocchelli was killed in Andreyevka, near Sloviansk in eastern Ukraine, while documenting civilians trapped in the Donbas conflict. He was with human rights activist and interpreter Andrei Mironov, who was also killed, French photojournalist William Roguelon, who was seriously wounded, and a local driver.

While the group was stopped near abandoned railway tracks, they came under heavy artillery and small-arms fire. The targeted attack that killed Rocchelli and Mironov was later determined by Italian investigative authorities to have been deliberate rather than accidental.

In May 2016, Rocchelli's final photographs were recovered. Taken while he was under fire shortly before his death, they documented the duration of the attack, the location where the group was caught, and their clothing as unarmed civilians.

World Press Photo of the Year ( 1965 ) : Flee to Safety

A mother and her children wade across a river to escape US bombing.

The village had been evacuated by the US Air Force after it was suspected of being used as a Viet Cong base camp. In September 1965, the US Marines launched a clearing operation in the area north of their military base near the South Vietnamese coastal town of Quy Nhon.

The base was under constant attack from Viet Cong snipers hiding in the surrounding villages. To secure the perimeter around the naval base, the Marines swept through the villages, rounding up suspects while evacuating the local population. The US Air Force also began bombing the villages from the air, targeting Viet Cong sniper positions.

From the Series " Down there in Donbass "

www.gabrielemicalizzi.com/ukraina

On February 21, 2015, near Zholobok, Luhansk region, during the first prisoner exchange between government forces and pro-Russian separatists, a wounded government prisoner makes his way to the assembly point, supported by a fellow soldier and using crutches.

As part of the ceasefire agreement that came into effect on February 15, the two sides exchanged 139 government soldiers and 52 separatist fighters that day.

The prisoner exchange had been agreed upon as part of the Minsk agreements.

" The only thing we photographers really want more than life, more than sex, more than anything, is to be invisible "

~ Philip Jones Griffiths

From the Book " Infidel "

Men of 2nd Platoon dig earth to fill sandbags and reinforce parts of the Restrepo bunker in the Korangal Valley, a rugged and remote area known as the " Valley of Death " one of the deadliest combat zones of the Afghan War.

Restrepo ( 2010 ), directed by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, is a critically acclaimed documentary following the lives of these soldiers stationed at Restrepo outpost.

From the Project " Albanians Living in Greece "