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AFP / Dominique Faget

An indelible mark

Agnès Bun, Sam Jahan Friday 22 September 2017

Covering the Rohingya exodus into Bangladesh left an indelible mark on AFP journalists Agnes Bun and Sam Jahan. For Agnes, the assignment suddenly became personal -- as she filmed the desperate tide of humanity fleeing, she pictured her family doing the same decades earlier, escaping the Cambodian genocide. Sam was struck by the children -- a soaking wet toddler all alone, a little girl terrified of a camera tripod, a small boy trying to save his mother. He couldn’t bear seeing such little lives shattered so utterly. Here they recount their stories.

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A woman rides her bike past a graffiti depicting Europe as the Grim Reaper, with a small door opening through its wall-like body and a barbed wire fence, in Thessaloniki on 4 October, 2015. AFP / Sakis Mitrolidis

The cursed truck

Gihad Darwish Wednesday 20 September 2017

In August, 2015, Austrian police unlocked a refrigerated poultry lorry abandoned on the side of the road. Inside were the mangled, decomposing bodies of 71 refugees -- all from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan -- who had suffocated to death in the truck soon after being smuggled into neighboring Hungary. Eleven members of the human trafficking ring responsible for transporting the migrants across borders went on trial in June for human trafficking and torture.

Nearly 5,000 kilometres (3,000 miles) away in the northeastern Syrian city of Qamishli, AFP video journalist Gihad Darwish watched the story unfold in denial, disbelief, then unshakeable horror. Among those mangled decomposing bodies in the truck were his two brothers-in-law and friends.

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AFP / NOAA/RAMMB / HO

Kindness in the eye of the storm

Katie Schubauer Monday 18 September 2017

Scattered amid the destruction wrought by the hurricanes that have ravaged the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico over the past several weeks are acts of kindness and generosity, carried out  unnoticed by ordinary folks. AFP’s video journalist Katie Schubauer describes a few, which she encountered as she covered Hurricane Harvey in Texas.

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An Afghan security force member stands at the site of a car bomb attack in Kabul on May 31, 2017. AFP / Shah Marai

An eternal season for killings

Anuj Chopra Thursday 14 September 2017

"Dread tingled down my spine as I scanned the crowd for my colleague," writes Anuj Chopra, looking back on his two-year posting as AFP Kabul bureau chief that wrapped up recently. "He’d disappeared into the group of revelers only seconds ago. It felt too long."

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