The Daily - The Photo of the Yemeni Girl

Episode Date: December 7, 2018

In the three years that Saudi Arabia, supported by the United States, has been at war with the Houthis in Yemen, very few journalists have been allowed into the country to document what’s happening there. The New York Times journalist Tyler Hicks is one. This is the story of how he came to take a photograph of Amal Hussain that drew international attention to the country’s plight. Guest: Tyler Hicks, a senior photographer for The Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

Tyler, can you describe the photograph? It's a young girl laying on her back on a dark cot in a hospital. And she's got brown hair that's pulled back behind one ear. And her face looks like any child of her age, a seven-year-old girl looking to one side, very pretty, very calm. But below the neck, you see this incredibly malnourished body. Her ribs are literally popping through her skin. The hands and arms are incredibly skinny. She's kind of clutching her own body with her hands, almost like she's holding on to what's left. And you can see, actually, on her right hand,

there's a fly on her thumb, and she doesn't have the energy to push it away. It just sat there. And you took this photograph? Yes, yes. I took this photograph at a small clinic, not even a hospital, but really a field clinic in northern Yemen during a recent assignment there.

I'm reluctant to display this picture though it was on the front page of a major newspaper in the United States Amal Hussein she's a victim of famine in Yemen this is what the decision is all about on the floor of the United States Senate

will we continue to expend American taxpayer dollars even American lives in support of the Saudi regime and their invasion in the war in Yemen. I understand the threat of Iran, and I understand we have to stand up to their aggression when and where it takes place. But did we enlist in this war?

Did the American people have a national debate about this war? Did we vote in the United States Senate to engage in this war? The answer is clearly no. In the three years that Saudi Arabia, supported by the United States, has been at war with the Houthis in Yemen, very few journalists have been allowed into the country to document what's happening there as a result of the war. Times photojournalist Tyler Hicks is one of them. This is the story of how he came to take that photograph of Amal Hussein. It's Friday, December 7th.

So, the North is where more of the humanitarian crisis is taking place. To go to the north, you're crossing from the government-backed Yemeni fighters to the Houthi side, who are still in control of Sanaa, the capital. Once we cross into Houthi territory, this is where things became more controlled. We have to have a minder. To a government person who's watching over. Yeah, they're with you everywhere. So as I'm taking pictures, that person is either at my side or close by,

keeping an eye on me. A lot of that has to do with, they don't want photographs of bridges and government buildings and any kind of sensitive things. Yeah. But what we wanted to really see was the malnutrition, which we'd heard so much about.

There's malnutrition, there's cholera, and it's affecting not only children, but the parents. And this all has to do with the fact that the economy is so destroyed there. There are no jobs. There's no money flowing into the hands of people. Now, this isn't something where there's actually no food. This isn't a drought.

The food is there. People have no ability to purchase it. These are the areas that we wanted to go and see how these people were doing. And after a couple of days, I finally was on my way to a small town called Aslam. And there, there's a little clinic. It's not what you would expect as a big hospital where people are flooding in.

And I was actually surprised when I arrived there in the parking lot because it's just a little white building and a compound. Not really anyone outside, one or two people, a guard walking around. And I thought, what's going to be here? This doesn't look like much. But once I got inside, within seconds I could see how serious the situation was. Most of the doors were open, and just looking in

from outside of the rooms looking in you could see that there are these children some laying on cots some being held by their mothers that were so malnourished that it was really shocking and i knew that i had arrived at the place where I could really document the reality of what was happening in the country to these people. And that is that children are starving to death. When I arrived, my immediate instinct was just to rush to these rooms and to start taking photographs. But culturally, to photograph women there is not as open as it is in the West. And I definitely don't blend in in Yemen. When I walk into a place, it's very clear that I'm a foreigner by the way I look, the way I dress. I'm carrying big cameras. There's no question in their mind that this person comes from away. And so I asked

a nurse to explain to the families that there's a photographer there that we want to show what's happening to them, what their condition, their suffering. So they first went around into each of these rooms and talked to the people, and not a single one of them objected. These people have been through so much that I think that at that point, the concern about having their picture made or showing their child at the lowest point of their lives, those concerns are overshadowed by somebody there who's willing to listen. There's no explanation for it other than that it's just an amazing understanding that happens between human beings sometimes.

So one of the first children that I saw was a young girl, seven years old, named Amal, who I could see even from outside the room, this skeletal figure laying on a cot. Her mother was sitting at the foot of the bed, and she virtually could barely move. She was just skin and bones laying there, but with this very peaceful and calm look on her face. Her head tilted to the side. She never lifted her head. She never looked up towards me. She never made any sudden movements. She was just almost like a statue just laying there. It was clear that she was very, very weak. Hmm.

What did you learn about how this seven-year-old girl, Amal, came to be in that hospital? Amal and her family be in that hospital? Amal and her family are originally from a town called Sadah in the north. And this is one of the hardest hit areas by Saudi airstrikes throughout the war. Huge parts of that city are completely destroyed. They were forced out of their home

as many others had fled from there to escape these bombardments three years ago. And like so many others, ended up in camps for displaced people. These places are very, very basic, tented makeshift tents. People build their homes out of sticks and sheets of plastic, shrubs. They're lucky to get clean water and the very basics of food. There's no hospital. I visited

some of these camps on this trip, and it's incredibly difficult living conditions. on this trip and it's incredibly difficult living conditions. And it wouldn't surprise anyone that there would be a huge amount of malnutrition and disease that just fester there. So you're standing in front of this extremely malnourished child. What do you do? You know, I'm a news photographer, so things are normally moving very quickly in front of me. You have to make split-second decisions. Things happen behind you, in front of you. You're coming in and out of rooms and buildings and outside and inside, and it can be very fast-moving. this. It's a challenge for me. It seems like you would just point the camera and here's this suffering child and take a picture. But really, I spent a long time to make sure that I got this photograph because I knew it was a very important photograph to show. This particular girl would resonate with people back home. And how is it that you knew that? That's difficult to explain. I've been a photographer for a long time.

I've worked for the New York Times for 18 years, primarily covering conflict, natural disasters, all kinds of wars around the world. And I've worked in a lot of very difficult places where people are suffering. This is by far the worst condition I've seen children. And there was something about her face actually for me, the way that she was looking to the side,

the difference between her face and her body. There's such a separation between this very sweet face and this completely malnourished body that really stood out to me. And I spent a lot of time photographing her. There was never any indication that they wanted me to leave or to be rushed. And that's really unusual situation often.

How many photographs of Amal do you think you took? It's hard to say. I certainly took hundreds of photographs of her from various angles, from further back, from up close. This is a very close-up photograph. Some I took even closer. I photographed just her hands, just her ribs. Really a lot of different variations to land on the photograph that I really thought would have the impact and would get the attention. And then I thanked her mother. I said in Arabic, thank you, and left the room. Tyler, what ended up happening to Amal? Well, several days after I took this photograph, we heard that Amal had been discharged from this small clinic. And I was surprised to hear that

because she was in such terrible condition when I saw her. Yet at the same time, I was, you know, gave me some hope that possibly she was being treated and improving. What we later learned was that the doctors encouraged the family to take Amal to a clinic that was 15 miles away, where they had a lot more ability to help people in this advanced state of malnutrition because her condition was actually deteriorating. However, her parents didn't have the money even to take her there. Not even 15 miles. Not even 15 miles. So they had to just return to their camp

just a couple miles away where Amal died just a few days later. So within about a week or so of you meeting her and taking these photographs, she had essentially starved to death. Yes. The world's attention has been drawn to the plight of starving children in war-torn Yemen. That's after the New York Times published a powerful picture of a dying girl. It was a photo very disturbing, very hard to look at. We want to warn you about it because we're going to show it to you in case you missed it.

But it's so important to see. Here's the photo. This is Amal, a seven-year-old girl being treated for severe malnutrition at the time. Many readers were struck by her haunting stare. They wanted to know what happened to her. Well, we understand that she died just a week after the photo was published. What did you think the reaction would be and whether there might be any risk in running an image of that kind of suffering. You know, I don't take photographs like this just for the sake of taking these photographs. Often, especially in conflict, the hardest to look at photographs are very often not the ones that you take or certainly not the ones that you publish.

or certainly not the ones that you publish. There are a lot of ways to illustrate war that do not include blood and gore. And I'm always looking for the emotion, the byproducts of that conflict. I will always go there first. In certain cases, this type of photograph is just, there's no other way to illustrate it. There's no other way to get people to look at it.

There's always going to be some blowback from publishing a photograph like this. Not everyone understands the value of showing suffering. They may say, why would you show this? But the lesson here is the amount of attention that this photograph got, the amount of attention that it brought to a conflict that is very undercovered, largely because it is so difficult to get into the country and it is a dangerous place to work. And so few journalists actually go there. We need to show these photographs, and I would never quarantine something like this from the readers, the viewers of the New York Times, because

that would be a disservice to the people that I'm photographing. This is an opportunity to tell their story. There's no other way to do it. Very rarely, but occasionally that is the type of image that needs to be shown. Especially, you know, still photograph, which I still think taps into a part of our brain that nothing else has the ability to do. It forces the viewer to slow down, forces the viewer to study the photograph and get something out of it. And I want somebody to stop and look at the photograph

and stare at it. I want people to stare at that. Do you think that the timing of the publication of this photo was in some ways kind of accidentally fortuitous in that the world's attention was very suddenly on Yemen because of the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi? And is that what started to draw lots of people's attention to the story? I remember thinking that even as a Times journalist, I wasn't paying much attention to this war until the days after Khashoggi's death and suddenly that

photograph that you took, and I'm not even sure exactly how many days or weeks before you'd taken it, suddenly that was a huge portrait on the front page of the paper. The fact that those coincided, I thought, was good because that brought even that much more attention to both sides of it. And it was a pure coincidence that... Just a coincidence. And, you know, we want these stories to be recognized. We want people to pay attention to them. And the fact that we were in Yemen working and seeing a lot of the problems that were happening because of the Saudi-led war at the same time that Khashoggi was killed. By Saudi Arabia. By Saudi Arabia was only brought that much more attention to what was happening. You know, that brings up something interesting. You know, people would ask me and ask Declan Walsh, the correspondent who I was working

with there, you know, why do people care so much about this one person, Khashoggi, who is killed when we have all these people getting killed here every day, children suffering, starving to death. You know, that's a bit difficult to explain to people that it's not just about the death of one person, that his life was worth more than anyone else's life, but the nature of how that was carried out and how that is a metaphor for how Saudi Arabia does business and how they deal with conflict. Everyone is suffering in different ways from this or dying in different ways from this. But I would hope that this photograph largely brings recognition and help to a place that is in desperate need of it.

Tyler, thank you very much for coming in and talking to us. Thank you for having me on the show. Since the beginning of the war, an estimated 85,000 children in Yemen have died of starvation, and millions more are considered at risk. On Thursday, the United Nations convened both sides of the war in Sweden to try to broker peace. Let us be in no doubt that Yemen's future is in the hands of those of us in this room. The coming days are a milestone. It's important. It's a significant event. Don't waver. Let us not, none of us waver in spite of the challenges that we may face.

Let us not, none of us waver in spite of the challenges that we may face. Let us work with good will, good faith, and with energy and commitment and conviction, and I'm sure we will deliver a message of peace for the people of Yemen. Thank you very much. Thank you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. It's been a bad morning. The Dow is down more than 500 points, and that puts it below the point in which it started the year, meaning all those gains have now been wiped off the market.

On Thursday, the arrest of a Chinese technology executive at the direction of the Trump administration deepened fears that the trade war between the U.S. and China will intensify, sending stock prices plunging for the second time this week. This is all associated with the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of the Chinese telco giant Huawei. She was arrested in Canada at the request of lawmakers here in the United States and they want to see her extradited to face charges. Meng Wanzhou was arrested on Saturday,

the same day that President Trump and President Xi negotiated a truce in a months-long battle of tariffs and counter-tariffs. Currently, there is a 90-day ceasefire in that trade war, but this shows how volatile and how fragile the relationship between Beijing and Washington is. The U.S. has not identified the charges against Meng, But the Times reports that prosecutors have been investigating whether her company, Huawei, has violated U.S. sanctions against Iran by shipping products to Iran that originated in the U.S.

The Daily is produced by Theo Balcom, Lindsay Garrison, Rachel Quester, Annie Brown, Andy Mills, Ike Sreeskanarajah, Claire Tennesketer, Thank you. director. Our technical manager is Brad Fisher. Our engineer is Chris Wood. And our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolman, Michaela Bouchard, and Stella Tan. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.