Reuters photojournalist Danish Siddiqui, killed Friday in Afghanistan, brought empathy and artistry to the images he produced

Photo assignment editor

July 16, 2021 at 11:40 a.m. EDT

Reuters photojournalist Danish Siddiqui was killed Friday in Afghanistan while covering fighting between Afghan security forces and the Taliban.

According to a report from Reuters, Siddiqui was in Afghanistan embedded with Afghan special forces in Kandahar since early this week and was killed in what was described as Taliban crossfire.

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Michael Friedenberg, president of Reuters, and Alessandra Galloni, the news agency’s editor in chief, released the following statement about Siddiqui:

We are deeply saddened to learn that our photographer, Danish Siddiqui, has been killed in Afghanistan.
Danish was embedded with the Afghan special forces in Kandahar province when they came under attack on Friday morning.
We are urgently seeking more information, working with authorities in the region, and supporting Danish’s family and colleagues.
Danish was an outstanding, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a devoted husband and father, and a much-loved colleague. Our thoughts are with his family at this terrible time.

Siddiqui was part of a team of photojournalists awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for coverage of the Rohingya crisis. But his career included coverage of a wide variety of news events, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the recent strife in Hong Kong and events in his native India.

Siddiqui once said that while he loved covering news stories from politics to business and sports, “what I enjoy most is capturing the human face of a breaking story.” And this is strikingly evident in his body of work — from the emotional and eloquent images of the suffering of the Rohingya, to the tension of a war zone in Afghanistan, to the joyful scenes of everyday life in places as far apart as India and North Korea.

Siddiqui brought both empathy and artistry to the images he produced. All of that can be seen here in this selection of images from throughout his career. His death is a tremendous loss for the photojournalism community.

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