Mukanoheri is a 49-year-old Tutsi woman who fled her home in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2024 after a wave of violence tore through her village. Fighters from the Nyatura militia carried out atrocities against her community, including hanging the head of a Tutsi woman in the village square.
“It was a massacre,” she said.
I met her in Nkamira transit centre, tucked among the green hills of western Rwanda on the border with DR Congo. More than 15,000 Congolese Tutsi have passed through since the M23 armed group began fighting over control of Goma, which it captured in 2025. Families like Mukanoheri’s fled a conflict that often casts entire communities as enemies. The war between the Congolese army and the Tutsi-led M23, backed by Rwanda, has made life especially dangerous for Rwandophone Tutsi, who are frequently labeled as collaborators, even though most had no part in the fighting.
Generations of Tutsi have faced discrimination and ethnic targeting in eastern Congo and, during the 1994 genocide, in Rwanda.
“In Congo, I couldn’t sleep well. I was scared I’d be killed in my sleep. At least here, we sleep peacefully,” she told me.
Shot on assignment for @newhumanitarian (April 2024)
Sirra Ndow is human rights activist from The Gambia and co-founder of the African Network Against Extrajudicial Killings and Enforced Disappearances (ANEKED).
She has spent years working with victims of the brutal rule of Yahya Jammeh, whose 22-year dictatorship left a trail of killings, torture and forced disappearances across Africa's smallest inland country.
For her, the work is deeply personal. Her uncle, a Gambian businessman, was among those who vanished during Jammeh’s rule. In 2013, he was arrested by state agents and never seen again. Like many families of the disappeared, hers was left without answers.
Today, Ndow dedicates her work to supporting victims of Jammeh-era abuses and pushing for justice, security sector reform and reparations. Much of her effort focuses on preserving the memory of what happened.
One of her initiatives is the Memory House, a small museum in Banjul that tells the stories of those who were killed, tortured or disappeared under the regime. Inside, photographs line the walls and personal belongings of the victims are carefully preserved. Among them are items that once belonged to her own uncle.
The project is part memorial, part archive and part call for accountability. She is part of a wider network of organisations, many founded by survivors and relatives of victims, working to ensure that the crimes of the Jammeh era are neither forgotten nor repeated. Their goal is to document abuses, bring perpetrators to justice and secure compensation for those who suffered under the dictatorship.
Shot while reporting for @newlinesmagazine in The Gambia (February 2023)
Adriana Giuvanovici, 71, lives alone in Plauru, a village at the edge of Romania’s Danube delta on the border with Ukraine. Her husband died two years ago of heart problems and her children live in the city of Tulcea, about 30 minutes by car and ferry.
“We hear loud noises and bombs every now and again,” she said, standing in her yard. “We got used to it, but of course we are afraid.”
The hum of drones sometimes cuts through the night, followed by explosions that rattle windows and shake people out of their beds.
As Russia targets Ukrainian port infrastructure along the Danube, Romanian villages squeezed against the border have found themselves on the frontline of a conflict in which they are not fighting.
Drone debris has repeatedly landed on Romanian territory, raising uncomfortable questions for Nato’s easternmost communities about security, escalation and how long civilians can be expected to live under constant threat.
“For more than three years we have lived with war over our heads. Some areas in Ukraine do not have the level of stress that we have here,” said Tudor Cernega, the mayor of Ceatalchioi commune.
“We are on the hotline. Practically, we are part of the war too."
Shot on assignment for @guardian (December 2025)
Captain Rania al-Jubara holds a Kalashnikov in one hand and her toddler’s fingers in the other. She lives in a straw hut near Kauda in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains with her three young children, aged eight, six and three. Her husband also serves in the military.
Al-Jubara is a fighter with the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), a rebel movement that has governed parts of the Nuba Mountains for decades after years of war with Sudan’s army. The group says it is fighting to create a secular and democratic Sudan.
She joined the movement after studying in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital. She said the political atmosphere there, particularly after South Sudan broke away from Sudan in 2011, pushed her toward armed struggle.
"That was the turning point," she told me. "I saw how Black people, non-Arabs, were treated, so I joined to fight against injustice."
When South Sudan became independent in 2011, many people in the Nuba Mountains had hoped they might also gain the right to decide their own future. Many Nuba had fought alongside southern rebels during Sudan’s long civil war. But when the new country was created, the Nuba region remained inside Sudan.
Violence soon returned and the Sudanese government in Khartoum launched a new military campaign in the Nuba Mountains against the SPLM-N and communities seen as sympathetic to the rebellion.
For many Nuba who had lived in Khartoum, the experience was also marked by racism, political exclusion and state surveillance. For al-Jubara, it was a moment of realization. She returned home to the Nuba Mountains and joined the resistance.
The war intensified over the following years. Sudan’s army carried out aerial bombardments and attacks that were designed to starve civilians in rebel-held areas.
During that period, while stationed with an SPLM-N unit, al-Jubara was pregnant with twins. One morning, a Sudanese air force strike landed just metres away, shaking the ground. She came out alive but the stress and trauma of the bombardment led to a miscarriage days later. She did not leave the army.
"This cause is bigger than my pain, bigger than my children."
Shot while reporting for @aljazeeraenglish (April 2025)
In Sudan, a bride and her village celebrate love in a time of war.
A year ago, the crops had failed, locusts devoured what remained as locals had to share everything with the over one million displaced people coming into the region after the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese Armed Forces started fighting. Many were living through the worst hunger crisis in memory.
In spite of that, the local community pulled together the resources they had after some respite from the hunger during the dry season and made the wedding happen.
In Sudan, @dru_an and I attended a wedding celebration that almost didn’t happen. For the @csmonitor we tried to capture not just the suffering but the resilience we witnessed in Sudan.
Shot for @csmonitor with the brilliant writer and travel partner @dru_a
Nicușor Dan - Bucharest’s moderate mayor and presidential candidate at the time - votes in his hometown of Făgăraș on May 18 in the rerun of the Romanian presidential election after results were canceled by the Constitutional Court in December amid fears of Russian interference. Now, after winning the election against populist ultranationalist George Simion, the president elect promises to deliver justice and administrative reforms that would change Romania while keeping it on a pro-European direction.
Shot on assignment for @politicoeurope (May 2025)
After the fall of the Assad regime, Homs has been a flashpoint of ethnic tensions with its Alawite community at its center — a sect that makes up a minority in Syria but formed the backbone of Assad’s rule. (January 2025)
Thirty years ago Nkundiye Thacien hacked down his neighbor and husband of Mukaremera Laurence with a machete during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. But for 19 years the two have been living together in the reconciliation village of Mbyo, where perpetrators of the genocide and survivors live side by wide. Belonging to the Hutu majority ethnic group in Rwanda, Thacien killed Laurence’s husband, who was part of the minority Tutsi ethnic group.
More than 800,000 people - by some estimates, a million - died during 100 days of mass killing at the hands of machete-wielding Hutus. The genocide was the most efficient and methodical mass killing in modern history, leaving no women, children, infants or men spared.
This week, Rwanda commemorates 30 years since the genocide, and while stories of forgiveness and unity like Thacien and Laurence’s exist, the reconciliation process continues to this day, as new mass graves are discovered and perpetrators that have stayed hidden are brought to justice. Critics say reconciliation has been forced and imposed artificially from the top down by the country’s president, who’s been in power since the genocide ended 30 years ago and who many describe as an autocrat. Photos taken while on assignment for @aljazeeraenglish (April 2024)
