Ghaith Abdul-Ahad was working as an architect in Baghdad during the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. He took a small camera, lent to him by a friend, and began taking photos in the streets to document the destruction and looting taking place in his city. Two weeks later, he found himself watching the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue. Abdulahad’s first job in journalism came the next day when, as Baghdad went through the turmoil of regime change, he met a journalist from The Guardian newspaper and started working as a fixer. After a year working as a news assistant and stringer for The New York Times Baghdad bureau and Reuters, Abdulahad joined Getty Images as a stringer and traveled through insurgent-held areas, taking pictures and writing dispatches for The Guardian. In 2006, he moved to Beirut but continued to travel regularly into Iraq, documenting the insurgency and the civil war, and also documenting other conflicts in the region, such as in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Yemen, and Somalia. In 2007, he was a participant in World Press Photo’s Joop Swart Masterclass. Abdul-Ahad currently lives in Istanbul and focuses on the continuing struggle to define a post-dictatorship era in the region. He has won a range of awards for his photojournalism.
