Sub-Saharan refugees and migrants desperately attempt to disembark from the inflatable boat in which they have travelled for several hours, and from which they are now being rescued on the Mediterranean Sea by members of the NGO Doctors Without Borders.
Refugees and migrants inside a bus at a detention centre in Tripoli run by the Anti-Illegal Immigration Agency, part of the city government.
Syrian and Libyan refugees (210 in all) rescued by members of the NGO Proactiva Open Arms, off the Mediterranean coast of the Libyan city of Sabratha, after their three wooden boats encountered problems. In the image, a woman is in shock.
Refugee and migrant women and children in the detention centre in Garabulli.
One of the refugees and migrants on board the rescue ship Bourbon Argos, also belonging to the NGO Doctors Without Borders, prays, offering thanks for being rescued.
A member of the Doctors Without Borders crew spray paints the Word RESCUED on a now empty boat.
One of the rescued refugees and migrants climbs aboard the NGO Doctors Without Border rescue ship Dignity.
A member of the NGO Doctors Without Borders carries a refugee and migrant youth who has fainted aboard an inflatable boat during a rescue operation on the ship Dignity 1 on the Mediterranean Sea, off the coast of Libya. 373 migrants (from countries such as Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Mali and Niger), including 62 women and 10 children, were rescued in international waters off the shores of Libya.
Food being handed out in a male-only detention centre in Milita, near Zauiya.
Refugees and migrants in the main courtyard of the Garabulli Detention Centre waiting for food to be distributed.
A Syrian boy cries out in pure panic while a crewmember urges passengers to stay calm during a rescue operation on the Mediterranean Sea carried out by members of the NGO Open Arms.
Refugees and migrants on the crossing from Libya to Europe on board fragile inflatable boats used to reach their destination.
Refugees and migrants on board the Bourbon Argos while blankets and food are handed out for the first night on the passage to Italy.
Refugees and migrants rescued on the high seas by members of Doctors Without Borders.
Writing on the wall in a detention centre in Misrata.
Refugees and migrants’ telephones confiscated at the detention centre in Misrata.
Intercepted by the Libyan Coast Guard just a few miles off the coast, refugees and migrants wait in the Port of Tripoli to be transferred to a detention centre; from there, they will be repatriated back to their home countries.
After two days on board the Doctors Without Borders ship Bourbon Argos, some refugees and migrants dance in celebration of their arrival to Calabria. Once on land, they will be transferred to detention centres on European soil.
Refugees and migrants await deportation in the headquarters of the Anti-Illegal Immigration Agency. In the background, the doors to one of the prisons where they were held for 24 hours before being deported to their home countries can be seen.
Some 250 refugee and migrant women with their children in the detention centre in Sabratha gather to fill water bottles from large decanters. When this photograph was taken, the director of the centre was requesting the cooperation of the international community to obtain food.
Members of the Libyan Red Crescent treat an exhausted refugee and migrant in the Port of Tripoli, picked up by the Libyan Coast Guard, as he and others wait to be transferred to a detention centre.
Refugees from Egypt, Tunisia, Bangladesh, Niger and Nigeria waiting to be hired for temporary construction work in Zuara.
Samir, 8, from Somalia, looks out the window of the NGO Proactiva Open Arms rescue vessel Astral, while other refugees and migrants rest on their way to Lampedusa during a storm. With up to 65 km-per-hour winds, the storm, undoubtedly, would have killed them all. Libya, with its 1.770 kilometres (1.100 miles) of shoreline plunged in chaos, has become an illegal immigration hub on the way to Europe. The migrants embark in rickety boats on hopeless crossings to Lampedusa, some 300 kilometres from the coast.
A migrant refugee asks for help from his boat on the central Mediterranean route.
Remains of a boat used by human traffickers on the central Mediterranean route, on the Zuara coast, one of the three main departure points for refugees and migrants.
Two families committed suicide in Sirte by triggering two ISIS DOGMAS or car bombs. This attack killed at least 12 combatants and injured 60 people. At the time of the image, a third car bomb was on its way but was intercepted before it could reach its destination. The official estimates indicate that the number of deaths during the offensive was around 500. In all, 87 DOGMAS exploded in the final weeks of the war (2016).
Family inside a car coming from Sirte, a city at that time controlled by ISIS. In the image, the military police checkpoint and Brigade 166, in Abu Qurayn, where ISIS launched a coordinated attack with the Albagla point, and which signalled the start of the Sirte campaign, can be seen (2016).
A comrade holds a wounded fighter’s hand, in a field hospital, during the Battle of Sirte against ISIS. The soldiers, mostly young and inexperienced, were mainly from the Libyan city of Misrata (2016).
A mortally wounded solider from the “Shelba” unit, allied with the Libyan government and backed by the UN, is moved after being shot on the front line, in Tripoli’s Salah al-Din neighbourhood. The fighting broke out in April 2019, when the self-proclaimed Libyan National Army under Field Marshal Khalifa Hafter launched an offensive to take Tripoli (2014-2020).
Fighters in Sirte, a city destroyed by the bombings. Years later, it would become one of the capitals of the ISIS caliphate (2011).
Protests in Bengasi with the image of Omar Al-Mujtar, hero of Libyan independence, call for international intervention and the imposition of a no-fly zone, just before Gaddafi’s troops arrived at the gates of the besieged city and were stopped by French aircraft (2011).
Positions on the Tripoli front between Tripoli government and Tobruk government forces, as the latter attempt to take the capital (2014-2020).
A fuel tank is in flames after the explosion of Grad rockets launched by Gaddafi’s army, in the port of the besieged city of Misrata. Meanwhile, a soldier makes the victory sign and screams “God is great” before the uncertainty of imminent death caused by more rockets or the explosion of the tanks engulfed in flames, which ultimately did not happen (2011).
Soldiers fire at ISIS jihadists during fighting in Sirte (2016).
The final days of the Battle of Sirte, where Gaddafi was hiding before his death, and which signalled the end of hostilities (2011).
A soldier at the time of his death caused by the explosion of a DOGMA (ISIS car bomb), in a field hospital during the Battle of Sirte (2016).
“Shelba” unit fighters, allied with the Libyan government and backed by the UN, aim at enemy positions on the front line in Tripoli’s Salah al-Din neighbourhood (2014-2020).
A child’s room destroyed in the fight against ISIS. What had been a crib can still be seen (2016).
A sniper’s telescopic view pinpoints Hafter’s nearby positions on the front line, in Tripoli (2014-2020).
Fighters loyal to the Government of National Accord (GNA), an executive transition body backed in 2015 by the UN, cover the body of an ISIS militant in district 2. Among ISIS’s ranks were a large number of sub-Saharan Africans, many of whom did not understand Arabic and could not read the Koran (2016).
A Tunisian military official tries to hold back the avalanche of immigrant workers, mostly Egyptian, but also Bengali, sub-Saharan African, Turkish, Tunisian and Libyan, at the Ras Ejder checkpoint in Tunis, when nearly 80.000 refugees tried to escape the war (2011).
A sniper with a homemade rifle outfitted with a DShK machine gun barrel fires at ISIS positions in Sirte (2016).
Soldiers use masks to be able breathe in the heavy gunpowder air produced by the multitude of shots fired inside a building during very intense and drawn-out fighting against ISIS, in Sirte (2016).
Boy with his father in Bengasi Square where posters are hung with the faces and names of people arrested or disappeared by the feared muhabarat (intelligence services) (2011).
Celebrating the liberation of Sirte from ISIS’s clutches. A last group of jihadists buried under the rubble threatened, that day, to blow themselves up. The soldiers had no choice but to douse the entire area in gasoline.
Bokoro: many families depart from this region on the route through Libya to Europe in search of a better future (Chad).
One of the daughters of Palestinian Yahya Hasanat, 37, cries over his death caused by shots fired by Israeli troops during the Great March protests (Gaza).
Children are always the most vulnerable in war, where decisions always conditioned by their parents shapes a future without any options (Bangladesh).
Bengalis and Egyptians that were able to escape Libya in 2011, in a refugee camp in Ras Ejder, wait in line to receive food (Tunisia).
Palestinians enveloped in smoke from burnt tires look up at the sky in search of gas shells being fired at them. They try using the smoke to reach the limits of the fence, during the Great March; still, in each protest, the participants suffer a high rate of deaths and injuries (Gaza).
The army of Bashar al-Assad bombarded several houses and bakeries, where people had been standing in line since dawn to buy bread. As a result, 50 people died and 197 were injured, most of them children. Two brothers are treated for machine-gun wounds at Dar al-Shifa Hospital, between Al-Shaar and Taril Al-Bab (Syria).
A woman tries to console her son in Borno. Many of these families flee the violence perpetrated by the group Boko Haram, taking the Libyan route in the attempt to reach Europe (Nigeria).
Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, in Kutupalong refugee camp. There are currently more than a million refugees in this country, and more than 25.000 false passports have been found, which are used to get them to Europe, as well as to other regions throughout the world (Bangladesh).
Sudanese and Southern Sudanese children (there are over 2.2 million Southern Sudanese refugees in Sudan) in a school in El Daein, in Darfur (Sudan).
Mohamed (at the wheel), a pharmacist from Hajin (Deir ez-Zor), with his wife and their three children (their son Majed and daughters Asma and Esra), left the city where they were living under ISIS control, during fighting against Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the final battle that signalled the disappearance of the caliphate (Syria).
Ramses Station, in Cairo, departure or transit point for many Egyptian migrants heading to Libya in search of economic opportunities or as a gateway to Europe (Egypt).
Members of the NGO Doctors Without Borders weigh a little boy in a mobile clinic in the region of Bokoro (Chad).
A boy is a given an oral polio vaccine in Borno. In recent years, Boko Haram, an ISIS-affiliated terrorist organisation, has attacked employees of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI, funded by an extensive range of public and private donors), mimicking the Taliban’s strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Since 2012, when nine vaccinators were gunned down, workers involved in anti-polio campaigns have chosen to travel through the country unannounced (Nigeria).
A woman feeds her child in a health centre in Borno. A large number of people here suffer from acute malnutrition due to the severe humanitarian crisis caused by the violence unleashed by the Boko Haram terrorist organisation (Nigeria).
Members of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) with a sniper, in a house situated on the front line in Deir ez-Zor, during the final battle before the fall of the ISIS caliphate (Syria).
An unconscious Palestinian, wounded by a sniper on the front line of the fence, is quickly carried in his friends’ arms. He died a short time later. (Gaza).
Sudanese families, most coming from Libya, explain that they were held in detention centres, at the UNHCR refugee camp in Agadez (Niger).
Syrians in the Al Hawl refugee camp, coming from the city of Deir al-Zor, from where they had to flee due to the fighting that ravaged the city for several years (Syria).
A Bangladeshi family in a tuk-tuk, the most commonly used transport because of its low cost. Bangladeshis have had the highest rate of migration to Libya from Asia/the Far East, since 2011 (Bangladesh).
Khan al-Ahma school in a Bedouin village. The school, where children without a future learn, is faced with a demolition order issued by the Israeli Supreme Court (Occupied Palestinian Territories).
Toyoba (dressed in blue) is 16 years old and has seven siblings. Despite her young age, her parents have decided to marry her off because they can’t afford to feed all their children: they are refugees without a future under current conditions. They live overcrowded in the Kutupalong refugee camp (Bangladesh).
Babies being treated in the hospital maternity ward of the NGO Doctors Without Borders in Kario, region of Darfur (Sudan).
A mother feeds her child suffering from malnutrition in Bokoro hospital, managed by the NGO Doctors Without Borders (Chad).
Nigerian traffickers who drive pickup trucks carrying refugees in Agadez, about to leave for Libya. Many come from Nigeria (Niger).
Relatives and friends burying Palestinian Nassar Abu Tayem, 22, killed by a bullet during the Great March of Return at the security fence with Israel while demanding his right to return to the houses and land from which his family was expelled 70 years ago. More than 254 Palestinians died and 23,600 were injured, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Gaza).
NGO Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kario camp, Darfur. In the image, a South Sudanese child is weighed during his check-up (Sudan).
Tunisians without any hope of a future, earning barely 300 euros a month on average, and facing overwhelming inflation; their future grows blurry in the search for opportunities (Tunisia).