From Syria’s festering conflict to the Bastille Day attack in Nice, Reuters photographers have been on the scene to record the biggest news stories this year.
A young woman tearing off the niqab she had been forced to wear for two years until U.S.-backed forces liberated her northern Syrian village from Islamic State and a Brazilian mother cradling her daughter who was born with microcephaly are among the most memorable images from 2016, reports Reuters.
Reuters has re-released a selection of striking pictures and our photographers’ accounts of the events behind them. They can be seen by clicking:
“Moments before I captured this image of Ieshia Evans I had my back turned photographing face-to-face confrontations between the police and the demonstrators,” Bachman said in his account.
“I heard someone behind me say something like ‘don’t stand there, they are arresting people in the street.’ I turned and looked over my right shoulder and saw this woman standing in the road. I knew right away what was about to happen. The police were going to arrest her. I quickly moved and took the shot.”
In Nice, 86 people were killed when a Tunisian-born man ploughed a truck into crowds watching fireworks on France’s July 14 Bastille Day.
Photographer Eric Gaillard took a harrowing picture of a covered body on the ground, a child’s doll beside it.
An image by Czar Dancel of a woman weeping as she held her partner’s body went viral in the Philippines last summer. President Rodrigo Duterte called it melodramatic.
Nearly 2,300 drug users and dealers have been killed in police operations or by suspected vigilantes since Duterte took office in June, according to the Philippines police.
In Iraq, U.S.-backed forces launched an offensive to oust Islamic State militants from their Mosul stronghold. Photographer Goran Tomasevic pictured people running after a coalition airstrike hit Islamic State forces nearby.
