Middle East in review
Middle East in Review is a monthly gallery that features some of the top photojournalism made by AP staff photographers and freelancers based in AP’s Middle East, Afghanistan & Pakistan region.
In this month’s selection, Middle East Regional Photo Editor Maya Alleruzzo shares some of August’s highlights.
A deadly Saudi-led coalition airstrike in Saada, Yemen that struck a bus full of civilians that included many children. Yemen’s shiite rebels backed a United Nations’ call for an investigation into the airstrike in the country’s north.
In Taiz, the city gives the clearest example of the intertwining of al-Qaida with militias funded by the U.S.-backed coalition to fight the Houthi rebels. Al-Qaida militants are among the fiercest fighters in the city, driving the rebels out of some areas, and militia commanders have close ties to and recruit from the group.
Violence erupted at the Gaza border after the territory’s militant Islamic Hamas rulers and Israel appeared to be honoring a cease-fire that ended two days of intense violence amid efforts by neighboring Egypt to negotiate between the two sides.
In the Jordan Valley, hundreds of crocodiles are stuck at the farm where they were brought in the mid-90s to serve as a tourist attraction. Ensuing Palestinian-Israeli violence kept visitors away, prompting the crocodiles’ purchase by an entrepreneur hoping to sell them for their skin, but his venture flopped after Israel passed a law in 2012 defining the crocodile as a protected animal, and banning raising the animals for sale as meat or merchandise.
Across the Muslim world, Eid al-Adha, or Feast of Sacrifice, Muslims slaughter sheep or cattle to distribute portions of the meat to the poor. It’s also the time when Muslim pilgrims make the annual Hajj pilgrimage on the first day of Eid al-Adha. The five-day pilgrimage represents one of the five pillars of Islam and is required of all able-bodied Muslims once in their life.
Curated by Middle East Regional Photo Editor Maya Alleruzzo