Los Angeles Instances overseas correspondent and photojournalist Marcus Yam was awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking Information Pictures on Monday for his compelling protection of the autumn of Afghanistan to the Taliban. It’s exceptional that he gained journalism’s highest honor in his first 12 months as a overseas correspondent. This Pulitzer is the fruits of all the good work Yam has produced during the last seven years on the Los Angeles Instances.
When the U.S. introduced that it might pull American troops out of Afghanistan, Yam believed this may not finish properly and he wanted to be on the bottom overlaying it from starting to finish. We, after all, 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 Could 9, 2021. Precisely a 12 months later, he earned a Pulitzer for his protection of the autumn of Afghanistan.
(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 may need occurred however was already pondering 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 a variety of human curiosity tales at the same time as different Western information organizations exited the nation attributable to safety points. This was maybe the toughest and most worrying time for me as a director of pictures. I frightened about his security each day, as I’m positive many people within the newsroom did as properly. 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 all the time remind me this was an essential story that wanted to be informed. He would guarantee me that he had two exit plans on daily basis and that he was secure. In the end, after some forwards and backwards, he would persuade me to let him keep and preserve 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.
Despite the fact that this award is for his pictures, what was equally as spectacular was his means to navigate the unknown. Yam turns into the sixth Los Angeles Instances journalist to win a Pulitzer for the pictures classes. He’s additionally the primary Malaysian-born journalist to ever win a Pulitzer for pictures.
A toddler cries as a person carries a bloodied youngster on a highway resulting in Kabul’s airport. Others assist a wounded lady 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. army transport planes. Taliban fighters used gunfire, whips, sticks and sharp objects to violently rebuff hundreds of Afghans on Aug. 17, 2021. At the very least a half dozen had been wounded, together with the girl and youngster.
(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 might by no means shield 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 recollections of the final time the fundamentalist group ran the nation, that it could possibly govern and police in addition to it could possibly 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. Outdoors the gates, the little bit of U.S.-held territory remaining within the nation, bedlam grew to become a each 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 making an attempt to hoist the purple, inexperienced and black nationwide banner. They had been typically crushed by militant fighters, who newly managed the streets of Kabul. About 200 individuals rallied towards the town heart on Aug. 19, 2021, chanting “Demise to Pakistan, God bless Afghanistan, lengthy dwell 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 overseas nationals. At the very least 170 civilians had been killed along with 13 U.S. service personnel, and at the least 200 individuals had been wounded. The explosion sophisticated 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 on daily basis, 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 conflict 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 companies, markets, an financial system, so that they inherited a greater Kabul than that they had 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 legislation and order, younger males keen to flee the mundane enterprise of governing and policing, who’re used to the depth of battle but additionally 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 automobile parked inside a residential compound within the Khwaja Burgha neighborhood in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 30, 2021. The U.S. army says that the air strike was meant to focus on ISIS-Ok militants and retaliate for an airport bombing carried out by the fear group. As a substitute, it took the lives of 10 civilians: members of Emal Ahmadi’s household, together with seven kids. The U.S. would finally name the strike a “tragic mistake.”
(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Instances)
A army transport aircraft 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. army withdrawal approached its conclusion, dying 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. army 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 might die and nobody be held accountable.
(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Instances)
Visiting for the primary time for the reason that 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, might 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 might 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 USA and is likely 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 completely different from that underneath the deposed nationwide rulers he derided as weak and corrupt. “We’ve got freed Afghanistan from Western imperialism and the infidels. Afghanistan will now be a peaceable and affluent nation, the place there can be safety, no corruption, and no theft,” he stated. All the 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 carrying American-made uniforms and brandishing American M4 and M16 rifles and driving 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 location of a frantic airlift that spirited greater than 120,000 individuals in another country. However there was no extra of that frenzied exercise on the deadline of the U.S. withdrawal, hours after the final U.S. army transport aircraft rumbled into the night time sky, closing the chapter on a 20-year U.S. intervention that ended the way in which it started: with the Taliban accountable for 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 sooner or later 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)
