Credits

Love+War is on Disney+ and National Geographic from 7 November 2025

Iraq 2003-2004

‘I was so young and so naive’

Iraq and Afghanistan Warning: Some viewers may find the following photographs distressing

An Iraqi woman walks through a plume of smoke rising from a massive fire at a liquid gas factory as she searches for her husband in Basra, Iraq, May 2003. Photograph: Lynsey AddarioInjured US soldiers are loaded into a bus to be taken from the Balad military hospital to the airplane out to Germany for further treatment, 13 November 2004, during the fight for Fallujah, which saw hundreds of injured soldiers have passing through the hospital. Photograph: Lynsey Addario/Getty ImagesUS Marines carry an injured soldier from the 173rd battle company. Korengal Valley, Kunar, Afghanistan, 23 October 2007. Photograph: Lynsey AddarioNoor Nisa, 18, right, in labour and stranded with her mother in Badakhshan province, Afghanistan, November 2009. Her husband’s first wife died during childbirth, so he was determined to get her to the hospital, a four-hour drive from their village. His borrowed car broke down and I ended up taking them to the hospital, where Noor delivered a baby girl. Photograph: Lynsey AddarioUS marines with female engagement teams. HM2 corpsman Elena Woods, 24, cleans her gun after returning from a forward operating base at Camp Delhi, in Helmand, Afghanistan, 29 April 2010. The FETs were attached to marine infantry battalions, and were operating in teams throughout, to try to engage Afghan women. Photograph: Lynsey Addario/Getty ImagesCorporal Lisa Gardner, takes the vitals of a group of Afghan women in Lakari village during a medical outreach in Helmand, southern Afghanistan, 3 May 2010. Most Afghan women in Helmand are not able to leave their homes, and are not able to be treated by male doctors as per cultural restrictions, so Gardner assisted by taking the vitals of the women, noting the symptoms, and passing everything to a docto for a rough diagnosis, before handing out medication for treatment. Photograph: Lynsey Addario/Getty ImagesThousands of Syrians cross into Iraq near the Sahela border point in Dahuk, northern Iraq, 21 August 2013. The UN High Commission for Refugees estimated that more than 30,000 Syrians crossed into northern Iraq since the border re-opened the previous week, and three to four thousand people were crossing daily. The mostly ethnically Kurdish refugees were fleeing increasing insecurity, economic strife, and a shortage of electricity, water, and food. Photograph: Lynsey Addario/Getty Images

Darfur*** ***2004-2009

‘The government was killing its own people’

Darfur Warning: Some viewers may find the following photographs distressing

Chadian girls brave a sandstorm in Bahaï, Chad, roughly seven kilometres from the Sudanese border, 18 August 2004. Thousands of refugees had streamed out of Sudan into Chad as fighting persisted in neighbouring Darfur. Photograph: Lynsey Addario/Getty ImagesLynsey Addario photographs Sudanese Liberation Army rebels, one of the rebel groups controlling parts of Darfur, 19 August 2004. Photograph: Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post/Getty ImagesSudanese Liberation Army soldiers sit by their truck while stuck in the mud in Darfur, 21 August 2004. The SLA were staging a 24-hour boycott of the Nigerian peace talks for Sudan in protest of recent new attacks against civilians in Darfur, which they say killed 75 civilians in six villages. Up to 50,000 people had died since the conflict began in February 2003 and more than a million have fled their homes for fear of attack by the Janjaweed. Photograph: Lynsey AddarioSudanese Liberation Army soldiers walk past a dead body left from an attack on civilians in the district of Farawyaiah, Darfur, 24 August 2004. Sixteen bodies lay in the surrounding ravines after men from five nearby villages were killed allegedly by Janjaweed backed by Sudanese Government forces. Photograph: Lynsey Addario/Getty ImagesAfrican Union soldiers find the village of Tama freshly burning more than a week after it was originally attacked by Arab nomads backed by government forces north of Nyala, November 2005. The AU made several attempts at patrolling and conducting an investigation on the village of Tama after it was attacked, and the surviving villagers fled to a nearby village, where they were kept away by nomads who continued to surround the village and shoot at approaching vehicles. Hundreds of villages have been burned and pillaged throughout Darfur by Arab nomads. Photograph: Lynsey AddarioThe village of Silea, which was recently bombed along with two other villages north of Geneina by the Sudanese government and simultaneously attacked by armed men on camels, horseback and donkeys, otherwise known as Janjaweed, in West Darfur, 28 February 2008. The government bombings were in response to an ambush two months prior by rebels from the Justice and Equality Movement, and subsequent intelligence that the group were living in these villages and using them as a base. Photograph: Lynsey Addario/Getty ImagesSudanese women sit and await aid being distributed by international humanitarian organisations in the village of Selea, February 2008. Photograph: Lynsey Addario

Libya 2011

Libya Warning: Some viewers may find the following photographs distressing

Libyans demonstrate against Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, in Benghazi, Libya, 26 February 2011. Dangerous confrontations have been going on between opposition forces and those loyal to Gaddafi across Libya. Photograph: Lynsey Addario for The New York TimesChildren play around a burning car in a residential neighbourhood in Benghazi, in Eastern Libya, 28 February 2011. Dangerous confrontations had been going on between opposition forces and those loyal to Gaddafi across Libya. Photograph: Lynsey Addario for The New York TimesOpposition soldiers fight against troops loyal to Muammar Gaddafi in Brega, Libya, 4 March 2011. Photograph: Lynsey Addario/Getty ImagesOpposition troops shoot at a portrait of Libyan leader Gaddafi as they celebrate after taking the city back from troops loyal to him, on the street west of Ras Lanuf, 5 March 2011. Photograph: Lynsey Addario/Getty ImagesOpposition troops rally and chant slogans as government troops carry out airstrikes at the main checkpoint near the refinery in Ras Lanuf, in Eastern Libya, 11 March. Photograph: Lynsey Addario for The New York TimesOpposition troops burn tires to use the thick smoke as cover from airstrikes at the main checkpoint near the refinery as rebel troops pull back from Ras Lanuf in eastern Libya, 11 March. Photograph: Lynsey AddarioJournalists, including New York Times photographers Tyler Hicks, right, and Lynsey Addario, far left, run for cover during a bombing run by Libyan government planes at a checkpoint near the oil refinery of Ras Lanuf 11 March 2011. Hicks and Addario, along with NYT correspondents Stephen Farrell and Anthony Shadid, were announced missing after falling behind the lines of Gaddafi’s advancing forces. Photograph: Paul Conroy/Reuters

Ukraine 2022

‘It felt very tense’

Ukraine Warning: Some viewers may find the following photographs distressing

Ukrainians clean up debris after a residential building was hit by missiles in south Kyiv, Ukraine, 25 February 2022. Russian troops have entered Kyiv and Ukrainians brace for a battle for their capital. Photograph: Lynsey Addario for The New York TimesUkrainian volunteer, Julia, 29, a teacher, weeps as she waits to be transported to a centre from which they will be deployed to fight Russian troops throughout Kyiv, Ukraine, 26 February 2022. Photograph: Lynsey Addario for The New York TimesUkrainian families were running across train tracks to get to the next train heading west out of Kyiv toward Lviv, at the main train station 4 March 2022. The capital city of Kyiv was extremely tense as Ukrainian men and women prepare for battle. Photograph: Lynsey Addario for The New York TimesA Ukrainian soldier runs to tend to a family on the other side of the street as another volunteer fighter lies on the ground after a mortar lands feet away. A steady stream of Ukrainian civilians are trying to make their way out of the village of Irpin, as Ukrainian soldiers try to hold back forces from entering Kyiv, 6 March 2022. Photograph: Lynsey Addario/Getty ImagesSome of the last remaining Ukrainian civilians are evacuated from the town of Irpin across the bridge on the periphery of Kyiv, as fighting continues between Russian and Ukrainian forces, 8 March 2022. Photograph: Lynsey Addario for The New York TimesAddario was a Pulitzer prize finalist for this image of Ukrainian soldiers attempting to aid a family moments after they were hit by a mortar round while fleeing the suburb of Irpin in Kyiv. Tetiana Perenyibis and her children Mykita and Alisa were killed. Anatoly Berezhnyi, a church volunteer who was helping to usher the family to safety, was also killed in the strike, 6 March 2022. Photograph: Lynsey Addario for The New York TimesA Ukrainian woman weeps as civilians and soldiers celebrate liberation from Russian troops the day after Russia formally announced it had retreated from villages along the Kherson front in Snihurivka, in southern Ukraine, 10 November 2022. This pullback would be the third major retreat after Kyiv and Kharkiv in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Photograph: Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

Family and war

‘I don’t want my kids to suffer’

Family and War Warning: Some viewers may find the following photographs distressing

Lynsey Addario at home with her son Alfred before leaving on assignment. Photograph: Caitlin Kelly/National GeographicAddario in Afghanistan, 2010. Photograph: Lynsey AddarioAfrican migrants from the Gambia, Mali, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Guinea, and Nigeria, in an inflatable boat between Italy and Libya, 4 October 2014. The migrants claimed to have left from Tripoli the evening of 3 October, and spent the night moving north. Photograph: Lynsey AddarioChuol escaped into a vast swamp in South Sudan when fighters swept into his village, September 2015. Photograph: Lynsey AddarioJamie Ferguson, 50, who had been in ICU for 74 days, one of the longest patients. He is slowly recovering from Covid-19 connected to an ECMO machine, at Royal Papworth hospital, Cambridge, England, June 2020. Photograph: Lynsey AddarioAddario at work covering the California wildfires in 2021. Photograph: Lynsey AddarioSonya Kryvolapchuk, 6, lies semi-conscious next to her mother, Natalia, 27, as she administers paracetamol with a syringe through a port at the Misto Dobra palliative care centre in Chernivtsi, Ukraine, 28 July 2024. Retinoblastoma cancer has metastasised throughout her body. Photograph: Lynsey Addario for the New York TimesLynsey Addario says goodbye to her son Lukas before leaving on assignment, April 2025. Photograph: Caitlin Kelly/National GeographicLynsey Addario on assignment in Tiné, on the Sudanese border in north-east Chad in May 2025. Photograph: Caitlin Kelly/National Geographic