Zakouma National Park is home to the largest remaining elephant herd in the world.

Rangers exhibit their riding skills as they return to base at Zakouma National Park, Chad, after weeks on elephant patrol. The park lost nearly three quarters of its elephants in the decade up to 2011, due to raids by Janjaweed rebels and poachers from Sudan. Since then—with the park under new management—Zakouma rangers, helped by intelligence from nomad groups, have eliminated poaching almost completely.

Michael Oryem (29) poached elephant with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), operating mainly in the Garamba National Park in DRC. He says he was asked by LRA leader Joseph Kony to take ivory to him in Darfur, Sudan, and that the LRA trades the ivory to the Sudanese Army. Oryem defected from the LRA and helped take Ugandan forces through the border into the Central African Republic to retrieve a stash of ivory he had previously hidden. He is carrying two of the six tusks he hid.

Margret Acino (32) was abducted from a field outside her village by the Lord’s Resistance Army, who accused her of informing on them to the Ugandan Army. She was mutilated before being released.

Ugandan soldiers cross a river while on patrol against the Lord’s Resistance Army close to the border of the DRC. They are on the tracks of an Lord’s Resistance Army contingent which has come from the Garamba National Park in the DRC, where they were poaching elephant.

Ranger Dieudonné Kumboyo Kobango stands with his son Genekpio, who escaped soon after being abducted from his village near the park by the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Benadete Kahindo (32) stands with her eldest daughter, Gift. Benadete’s husband, a ranger, was killed by the FDLR, a notorious Hutu-led rebel group that has operated inside the Virunga National Park since the Rwandan genocide. A year later, Gift, then aged 14, was raped by M23 rebels, a group that claims to oppose the FDLR. The family survives on funds and donations.

A shipping container stands open in the port at Lome, Togo, after customs officers had seized four tonnes of illegal ivory, found using new container-scanning technology. DNA evidence linked the ivory to an elephant massacre perpetrated by Seleka rebels in Dzanga Bai, Central African Republic, in 2013.

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Broken Border