Pulitzer Prize-winning Indian photojournalist Danish Siddiqui was killed on Friday while covering a clash between Afghan security forces and Taliban fighters near a border crossing with Pakistan.
Working for Reuters since 2010, Siddiqui covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Rohingya refugees crisis, the Hong Kong protests and Nepal earthquakes.
Siddiqui was part of a Reuters team to win the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for documenting the Rohingya refugee crisis.
Here’s a selection of his work:
In one of his last pictures, Siddiqui photographed a member of Afghan special forces firing at Taliban fighters at a check post in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province. Siddiqui was embedded as a journalist since earlier this week with Afghan special forces in Kandahar.
Siddiqui extensively covered the brutal second wave of the coronavirus pandemic in April and May as it ripped through India’s cities and villages. In this picture published on 15 April, Covid-19 patients are treated at Delhi’s largest Covid hospital.
Siddiqui’s pictures of mass cremations of Covid-19 victims at funeral grounds in Delhi next door to populated neighbourhoods went viral.
The funeral pyres burning round-the-clock and cremation grounds running out of space told the story of a death toll unseen and unacknowledged in official data.
A woman is consoled by her children after her husband died from Covid-19 outside a mortuary in Delhi.
Siddiqui travelled to smaller cities and villages to chronicle the unfolding tragedy. In the mountainous Uttarakhand state, he took this picture of a Covid-19 patient being taken to a local dispensary by her nephew.
In April 2020, Siddiqui covered the exodus of tens of thousands of migrant workers from India’s cities following a sweeping lockdown to prevent the spreading of coronavirus.
Sprawled together, men, women and children began their journeys at all hours of the day. They carried their paltry belongings – usually food, water and clothes – in plastic bags. The young men carried tatty backpacks. When the children were too tired to walk, their parents carried them on their shoulders.
In August 2017, a deadly crackdown by Myanmar’s army on Rohingya Muslims sent hundreds of thousands fleeing across the border into Bangladesh.
They risked everything to escape by sea or on foot a military offensive which the United Nations later described as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.
In September, Siddiqui took this picture of an exhausted Rohingya refugee woman touching the shore after crossing the Bangladesh-Myanmar border by boat.