The city was completely destroyed.
I was really not expecting to see anyone,
let alone a boy riding his bike.
[Developing News]
My name is Felipe Dana.
I’m a Brazilian photojournalist.
I work for the Associated Press, covering news,
especially in Latin America,
and nowadays, a lot in the Middle East.
This photo was from my first time in Iraq in 2016.
That day, I was embedded with the Iraqi Special Forces.
Mosul was extremely important for ISIS
because that’s where they declared their caliphate.
It took nearly nine months of an international coalition
to regain control of the city.
It was a very, very intense day of firefights and airstrikes.
They decided to push into ISIS territory.
That’s when ISIS started to counterattack
and use these suicide car bombs.
We were talking when this major explosion happened in front of us.
I just had time to raise the camera and take a few frames.
And you can see the debris beginning to fly,
and rocks begin to fall on my helmet, my shoulders, and my camera.
After a few seconds, when the dust settled a bit,
I saw that the photographer that was standing next to me
had his cameras destroyed.
To be honest, this photo was just a reflex.
I just heard the explosion and pointed a camera
and shot these pictures.
So the biggest operation against ISIS began in Iraq,
but it ended here in Syria.
This is a photo of a woman and her baby
evacuated from the very last territory held by ISIS.
As ISIS lost territory,
many of these people moved along with them.
I was used to seeing civilians fleeing the war and asking for help.
And in this case, many of these people were actually supporting ISIS
and were very aggressive towards us,
saying that their husbands would still fight,
ISIS was still alive.
I wasn’t feeling any safer;
let’s just say that.
I was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
That's where I began to learn photography and start my career.
So this photo was taken in July 2016
in one of Rio’s most dangerous slums.
The Brazilian government invested a lot in security
ahead of the World Cup and the Olympic Games,
and the so-called police pacification program
that was meant to curb the violence
was not working.
My idea at the time was to show that almost all of the favelas
and slums in the city were still ruled by gang members.
To go there as a photojournalist,
I had to ask permission to their bosses first.
Of course, the ones that agreed to be photographed, like these,
they covered their faces
because they didn’t want to be identified.
Three weeks before the games, we were carjacked.
They took the car with all of our gear inside.
We started making phone calls,
and I explained that I was actually working with that same gang.
So they managed to give our gear back.
I found it ironic
that I was doing a story to tell how secure the city was,
and I was carjacked and robbed.
That photo is in Salvador, north in Brazil.
There was a police strike at the time.
Just a few days into the strike,
we already start to see all these robberies
and banks being broken into.
All these gangs took advantage of it,
and turf wars between gang members increased really quickly.
One night I got a call that a body was found in the street.
Dozens of residents were gathering
around the body of this man that was shot.
You can even see that people climbed on the rooftops
to get a better view of what was happening.
A week into the police strike,
the number of murders had already doubled.
Brazil is already one of the countries
with the highest murder rates in the world,
so can you imagine when it doubles in a week?
This was at the end of the operation when they reached the old city.
Hundreds of civilians were emerging from the rubble.
The city was already completely destroyed.
Just the level of destruction in the city was so brutal.
When I took this photo, it felt very surreal.
I was near the front line,
which was just probably a kilometer away from this,
and we drove past this completely destroyed neighborhood.
And then I saw this car on top of a destroyed house.
I didn’t know how the car got there,
if it was an explosion or... I don’t know.
I decided to climb on top of a house that was just across,
and this boy just rode past on his bike.
I was really not expecting to see anyone in that area at that time,
let alone a boy riding his bike very peacefully.
I think this photo shows the horrors why people flee the war.
But it also shows what the people that stay
and are lucky enough to survive have to face.
And that's the most recurring thing that I see in my work.
The majority of the people in this city were not ISIS.
They were innocents like this kid.