IT was the great Robert Capa, one of the finest war photographers of the 20th century, who put it best. Asked what he would most like to be if he were not a war photographer, Capa gave the memorable reply: “An unemployed war photographer.” Looking back across Capa’s vast and remarkable body of work we are probably all familiar with some of the images he made before being killed when he stepped on a landmine in Indochina in 1954. Who hasn’t seen those grainy black-and-white photographs he took amidst the maelstrom and fury of Omaha Beach on D-Day, or that famous “falling soldier” picture from the Spanish Civil War?

Capa, of course, made the ultimate sacrifice for the incredible photographic legacy he left behind, and those within our profession as war reporters remain under no illusions as to the risks we run in seeking out images of conflict.

In the decades I’ve been photographing war, the death or wounding of colleagues and friends reminded me, time and again, of what can happen when you document far-off trouble spots.

“This war in Afghanistan will go down in history, and I want to be in there – close – getting it all on film,” ITN cameraman Andy Skrzypkowiak once told me when I was a young photojournalist covering the Soviet war there. He would be killed doing just that a short time later.

Then there was my photographer and filmmaker friend Martin Adler, whom I worked alongside in Somalia and Haiti. It was during an Islamist rally in the Somali capital Mogadishu that he was shot dead at point-blank range by an unknown gunman.

People often ask whether I’ve grown weary of the war I’ve witnessed. Putting together the images for an exhibition due to open in Glasgow and looking back across decades of prints, slides and negatives, I’m frankly amazed that I wasn’t more weary years ago.

The exhibition at the new Sogo Arts gallery in Glasgow is a look back over those decades, but it remains a cameo retrospective given the huge archive I now have. That I have not grown weary of photographing war is perhaps because of one thing above all else.

I’m talking now about the remarkable courage and fortitude of those ordinary people I have met along the way, caught up in war through no fault of their own.

Their generosity and openness in allowing me into their lives, often at dangerous and traumatic moments, is what has kept me going these 40 years, and reaffirms my own faith in humankind’s capacity to endure and occasionally overcome.

It was a long time ago when I decided what the title of my forthcoming exhibition would be. For not only does it come from a book by my favourite writer, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, but captures the very essence I believe of what is required to photograph war and what it inflicts on ordinary people.

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

‘WELCOME TO THE LION’S DEN’
- VUKOVAR 1991

IT had become a Croatian Stalingrad. Its siege and the determination of its defenders would also become legendary. In what remained of the town, the still unfallen walls stood up like reefs beneath the surface of a lagoon. For what became months, Vukovar’s Croatian defenders lay under a web of arching shells in a suspense of uncertainty.

“Get down here,’’ shouted Marian, the receptionist at the city’s Hotel Dunav one afternoon, pulling me into a corridor as narrow as a baby’s coffin. There was another shattering explosion and I chased Marian across the lobby, crunching through glass and broken masonry where the entrance had been blown in seconds before.

Downstairs in the basement “disco” we joined the hotel’s cooks and cleaners. Like so much of war, the scene was surreal – heavily armed Croatian soldiers dancing with waitresses to Shiny Happy People from a generator-run television showing MTV; all of us wincing as the picture crackled and plasterwork fell from the roof with the arrival of another shell.

Waiting for an explosion is the longest passage of time I know. At night we would lie in the corridors shivering like wet dogs, waiting for the next one, the floors soaked from blasted water tanks and littered with dead seagulls, blown into the building from the River Danube by the impact of tank and mortar rounds.

The days were spent running the gauntlet of snipers and trying to pull together the words and pictures that never paid the bills at home. That moment of fear waiting to make the dash across the street, it was always as if all my senses rushed to the back of my neck. Like when I was a child, going off the high board at the swimming baths for the first time. “Will I, or won’t I?” Then suddenly you are out there, committed, exposed. Often I would imagine the sniper squinting through the cross-hairs. What was going through his mind at the moment he took aim? Bullets travel faster than sound, so I’ll never hear the one that gets me, I reassured myself.

“Welcome to the house of fun, now I’ve come of age, welcome to the lion’s den,” a young Croat soldier sang in a drunken rendition of the song by Madness as we waited to dart across a street one morning.

Glassy-eyed, his face daubed with camouflage paint and topped with a Rambo-style headscarf, he clearly didn’t give a damn any more. “Who killed Laura Palmer?’’ he asked, before flicking his cigarette into the mud and sprinting into the street.

Within seconds his steps were like those of a stunned bullock. Later, as I bolted past, I saw him twitch, his hand open and close momentarily. He never would see the last episode of the TV series Twin Peaks, or learn who killed Laura Palmer. All of the fighters caught up in those battles seemed so young. Many fought to the end in Vukovar; others captured were later executed, murdered by the advancing Serb forces.

It was after a lunch of soup, bread and beer one afternoon when two young Croatian fighters asked me to take their photograph. It was a candid portrait of them taken in seconds, but somehow, looking at it afterwards, it seemed to catch a bond between them that had evolved over time. Their expressions always struck me as a mixture of determination and anger, but also a resignation to the fate that would most likely befall them when Vukovar was finally overrun.

WAR OF BROTHERS 
- KABUL 1995

YEARS after the Russians had withdrawn from Afghanistan as Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of “glasnost” and “perestroika” prevailed, the daily ritual of slaughter and survival was no longer against the Communists. Having routed the “Reds”, Afghanistan’s “holy warriors” now turned on each other in a bitter factional struggle for control of the country’s capital, Kabul.

During the days of the Soviet occupation, it was known as the Russian Science and Cultural Centre. In the years that followed that Soviet withdrawal, however, it became little more than a frontline ruin, its walls pockmarked and punctured by the bullets and shells that ripped the district apart during the fighting between rival Afghan groups in the 1990s.

Until very recently my memories of this place have always been bad ones. On one occasion around the time this photograph was taken, I was injured here during rocket exchanges. A few years later in the same building I came across a homeless refugee family whose children had frozen to death while taking shelter from the bitter Afghan winter. For years the centre’s labyrinthine ruins became a magnet for Kabul’s dispossessed. In every room, corridor and alcove strewn with faeces, rubble and used syringes, heroin addicts cowered.

Just a few months ago, however, as part of a BBC documentary being filmed about my war reporting and photography, I returned to the now rebuilt Russian Cultural Centre. There I met Nekrasov Viacheslav, the new director of the centre and a veteran of the Soviet War sometimes referred to as “Russia’s Vietnam”.

“This is me, when I was an advisor here in Afghanistan in the 80s,” Viacheslav tells me, pointing to the figure of a young man in a black and white photograph in which he is sporting a fur hat and the same Freddie Mercury style moustache back then as he does today.

“We worked closely with many Afghan communities sometimes in remote rural areas bringing health care and schools, I’ve been connected with Afghanistan ever since,” Viacheslav explained, as we wandered past image after image from those times, some showing young Russian soldiers high in the Hindu Kush mountains.

All the photographs, including portraits of former and current Russian ambassadors to Afghanistan and other memorabilia that lie on shelves, is part of a tiny museum tucked away in the centre, which sits in Kabul’s Deh Mazang district and is all but unknown to many Kabulis outside on the city’s streets and neighbourhoods.

Today, Viacheslav, who once brought a Russian student journalist delegation to conferences at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, also brings veterans of the Soviet-Afghan war to the centre, where former Russian paratroopers have paid for and erected a memorial to all their comrades and Afghans killed in that bitter conflict. “Today that war is behind us but not forgotten, and Afghanistan now faces other pressing and challenging times,” said Viacheslav as we concluded our tour of the museum without another soul in sight. Challenging times indeed as yet another “war of brothers” grips the country while it struggles with the Taliban.

SURVIVING THE MANO BLANCO
- COLOMONCAGUA CAMP, EL SALVADOR-HONDURAS BORDER 1985

I REMEMBER it as though it were yesterday. It was almost as if a scene from Graham Greene’s novel Our Man In Havana had come to life. Stepping off the plane at Managua Airport in Nicaragua, it was the humidity that hit me first, then the sight of the palm trees swaying gently in the breeze.

Then suddenly there they were, Nicaragua’s Sandinista revolutionaries. Some wore red and black neckerchiefs, while others were dressed in khaki fatigues, dark patches of sweat beneath the straps of the rifles slung over their shoulders.

I’ve finally arrived, I thought to myself. This is what being a foreign correspondent and photojournalist is all about.

It’s the best part of 40 years ago now since I arrived that day in the Nicaraguan capital, in the wake of the leftist revolution by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) that overthrew the monstrous dictatorship of President Anastasio Somoza Debayle. For 43 years the Somoza family had ruthlessly ruled over this Central American country, but now it was in the hands of the new Revolutionary Government under commandante Daniel Ortega.

That the revolution’s immediate aftermath was my first ever foreign assignment as a photojournalist is perhaps the main reason it remains etched in my mind’s eye.

But there were other reasons too, not least because what followed next would be the first war I ever reported from, as the Sandinistas subsequently went on to fight for the 

revolution’s survival against the right-wing Contra rebels who were armed and supported by Washington and the CIA.

In the months and years that followed I would find myself covering too the humanitarian fallout from the civil war raging in neighbouring El Salvador.

Housed in rows of tin-roofed wooden shelters in Colomoncagua Camp just inside the Honduras border, more than 13,000 Salvadoran refugees lived on aid from international relief organisations, waiting for a peace that would allow them to return safely to their homes.

Cordoned off from the rest of Honduras by harsh terrain and the Honduran Army, at night the refugees encamped there could look down across the Honduran-Salvadoran border to see what they had fled.

Through the nighttime air, the percussions of aerial bombing echoed just a few miles away in the rocky slopes of Morazan Province in El Salvador.

Bursting flares illuminated the distant night sky, and warplanes fired lines of glowing tracer bullets into the black Salvadoran countryside. Those refugees I spoke with back then talked of the terrible atrocities they had witnessed.

Some, like one young mother clutching her malnourished daughter, told me of the “death squads”, especially the “Mano Blanca”, whose calling card was to leave a white painted palm print on the outside of the house from which they would target their next victims.

“We fled after they left their mark,” the woman told me that day as I photographed her with her daughter. “It was the only way to survive."

SUN, SEA AND SOMALI FLOWERS
- MOGADISHU, SOMALIA 2010

SUN, sandbags and submachine guns ... as holiday advertising slogans go, it doesn’t have much going for it. Then again, Mogadishu as an annual relaxing getaway destination is some way off from being the new Mauritius.

Though well-endowed with a stunning expanse of natural coastline beaches, Somalia’s capital still comes with the ominous reputation of being one of the world’s most dangerous places.

As if to make that very point, Bashir’s boys fanned out around me on the fine sand of Mogadishu’s Lido Beach.

Draped in bandoliers of bullets and carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles, this mean-looking eight-man squad of bodyguards made the SAS look like Boy Scouts.

I’d dubbed them Bashir’s Boys after the name of the local hotel owner who provided them for my personal security. Throughout my visit they would never be far from my side.

“Ten minutes at the most,” insisted one of the “Boys”, sensing that I was looking to spend some time photographing the families frolicking in the sand and waves thundering on to the shoreline from the Indian Ocean.

For most denizens of Mogadishu, such public freedom and fun would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

Sharks are said to infest Somalia’s waters and in more recent times modern-day predator pirates have since added to the Horn of Africa’s coastal notoriety.

For Bashir’s Boys though, these bandit seafarers were the least of their worries.

Over decades Mogadishu, battered by dictatorship, warlordism and jihad, has had more than its fair share of bogeymen. Right now, al-Shabab, Islamist militants linked to al-Qaeda, remain the biggest threat in town. This despite them having been officially “dislodged” from Mogadishu years ago now by thousands of UN-backed African troops. That bloody campaign ran for more than six years and cost the lives of 3000 soldiers and thousands more Somali civilians.

But today, elements of al-Shabab remain in Mogadishu, some having infiltrated the very security apparatus that is meant to hunt them down.

It was not the first time I had been in the city. In early 2002 I found myself landing by small plane on a dirt airstrip some miles outside of Mogadishu. In cinemas back home, the movie Blackhawk Down had just opened. Somalia was on the public as well as political radar and everywhere the talk was of the “War on Terror”.

Director Ridley Scott’s film tells the story of a disastrous mission by elite US troops to capture warlords in Mogadishu in 1993 and became a byword for the mean streets of this anarchic war-ravaged place.

When I first arrived back then, the no-man’s land that divided north and south Mogadishu’s rival militias had become the lair of looters and shooters.

In its canyons of bomb-blasted ruins, old Cinzano signs – a hangover from its Italian colonial past – remained pinned to walls so peppered with bullet holes they looked like Swiss cheese.

Elsewhere on the streets, telephone poles leaned at ominous angles like voodoo totems, the stubs of their severed tops long since stripped of wires for sale in the black market.

Mogadishu’s once-languid boulevards were awash with garbage and sand, the humid wind coming off the Indian Ocean leaving a wavering sea of blue and pink plastic bags hanging from every scrap of withered vegetation. Even today locals still refer to these as “Somali flowers”.

Today Mogadishu is coming back to life. Other great cities like Beirut and Sarajevo have bounced back from recent wars to recapture their former glory, why not Mogadishu?

Only the very naïve would say that Somalia’s capital is anywhere other than in the first few steps of that journey, but the signs are good.

Shortly before my departure from Mogadishu I returned to the city’s Lido Beach and old fishing quarter. Every day now the children play in the surf and the old men can be seen fishing from the rocks.

Mogadishu may not be Mauritius in the making, but for now its long-suffering citizens I’m sure will settle for peace, stability and some sense at least of enjoying what life is really all about.

‘WE ARE HAPPY HERE IN THE FOREST’
- COLOMBIA 2014

THEY call it the River of Butterflies. Occasionally I was to see a few of the insects, big, brash and beautiful, as our canoe made its way upstream through the khaki-coloured water of the Rio Andagueda towards the mining towns of Bagado and San Marino. Silent and fleeting, the butterflies’ delicate presence hovered in marked contrast to the giant lumbering steel diggers that trundled to and fro on the banks of the river hewing out chunks of rainforest.

For time immemorial, this same dense, humid forest has been the habitat of these butterflies and Colombia’s indigenous people who live in Choco Province.

Mining for gold goes back a long way here, back before the Spanish Conquest that brought with it African slaves, the ancestors of today’s Afro-Colombian population.

Even before these African slaves arrived, the Embera were here. Native American hunter-gatherers, this indigenous people’s harmonious signature on the rainforest landscape is etched yet further back in time.

“When we remember our ancestors, we can see the future,” one Embera man told me when asked what he thought the years ahead held for his people, in this country so long wracked by war and violence.

Explaining further, he said there was a need for his people to live in peace, at one with nature, but not shy of modernity.

In today’s Colombia, that is easier said than done. For a long time this has been a country with an infamous reputation, a place synonymous with cocaine and criminal cartels. Individuals such as drug lord Pablo Escobar and cities like Medellin and Cali long made Colombia the world’s best-known narcostate.

So pervasive is Colombia’s reputation that few people see past this towards any wider understanding of the country’s problems.

Not least among these is that Colombia was subjected to Latin America’s longest running conflict – going on 50 years – in which left-wing guerrilla groups, right-wing paramilitaries and Colombia’s government and armed forces slogged it out in a bitter and barbaric struggle.

Inextricably connected with this wider conflict is another battle for land and resources that impact on the likes of the Embera, Afro-Colombians and peasant – campesino – communities.

Today, the Embera are one of the 34 Indigenous Peoples identified by the Colombian Constitutional Court as at risk of physical or cultural extinction.

For the Embera, a close connection with nature is an integral part of their culture. “Everything has spirits for us – plants, trees, animals, everything in nature,” one young woman told me, before admitting that while she retains many traditional beliefs, she no longer believes in the spirits and neither do her children.

During my time among some of the Embera’s troubled communities I made many photographic portraits, but perhaps this one pleases me most. “We are happy here in the forest,” this proud, defiant and dignified woman told me. “All the armed groups have taken our lives, and we have always been caught in the middle of the conflicts, but in our hearts here in the forest is still where we are most happy.”

'SOMETIMES AT THE END OF A DAY, I FEEL NO GOOD'
- RAQQA, SYRIA 2018

DEATH is everywhere in Raqqa. Sometimes it lurks beneath the mountains of bomb-blasted rubble and pancaked buildings. Other times it peeks out from beneath the earth in the form of bones, hair and decomposing flesh the colour and texture of ancient dried parchment.

Often it moves around the city, its stench drifting on the humid breeze, creeping into the nostrils and psyche when you least expect it.

More than anyone else here, the men of Raqqa’s Civil Defence Unit know where death can be found. For going on six long months before I photographed them, they had sought out its many locations and collected its gruesome detritus along the way. On one afternoon I joined a small group of firemen who were busy uncovering a mass grave in one of Raqqa’s city-centre parks.

Surrounding the entire square, the buildings were little more than skeletal shells, and by the roadside the burnt-out carapaces of vehicles, many upturned as if tossed by some giant hand, were also testimony to the destructive firepower unleashed here.

When I arrived, three blue body bags already filled sat by the ditch in which the firemen were labouring with shovels and pickaxes in the oven-like midday heat. Clouds of flies hovered over the ditch and body bags. The smell was stomach-churning.

“Such a waste of human life, and the terrible destruction of the place in which we once lived, it makes me so angry,” said Mahmoud Jassm, the 30-year-old leader of the team who like many of the men is also a volunteer with the unit. It’s all a far cry from Jassm’s previous role as a PhD student studying Arabic language and literature before war came to Raqqa.

“Men, women, children, mostly civilians but we find many Daesh (Islamic State) fighters too, both in the graves and the rubble,” Jassm said, bending forward to peer inside at one of the victims in the body bags that is wrapped in a heavy blanket.

“Look, it’s a young woman, she can’t be more than 25 years old,” Jassm said, the sense of frustration evident in his voice.

“Sometimes at the end of a day, I feel no good,” he confessed, shaking his head, giving the impression of a man on the edge of despair. The physical and psychological stress that he and his colleagues face is unimaginable.

Firemen here who routinely handle dead bodies risk contracting tuberculosis and gastrointestinal infections, as well as suffering potential effects of trauma on their mental health.

Despite this, Jassm regards what he and his team do as “rescue work”, saving the victims from anonymous oblivion, but the reality right now is that very few of the bodies recovered can be identified.

With no existing capacity to do DNA testing, many of those found are inevitably simply moved from where they are found to another mass grave created by the authorities on the outskirts of Raqqa.

“It makes no difference to us if they are Daesh or civilians, they are all human beings and deserve to be seen as such by us and by God,” one of the team told me after the prayer, and they began to place the remains gently into the mass grave. Once again, civilian victims and Daesh fighters lie together. This time, though, it will most likely be their final resting place.

'I WAS CARRIED LIKE A BRIDE AT HER WEDDING'
- MOSUL, IRAQ 2017

AS the bus carrying the new arrivals snaked its way down the dirt road towards Chamakor Camp, I could just make out the faces peering from the windows. As it drew closer the faces became clearer, and the exhaustion and apprehension of those on board was unmistakable. The siege of Mosul and their desperate escape form the beleaguered city had taken its toll.

Stepping from the bus, their clothes ragged and dirty, many of the men still had the heavy beards Islamic State group’s religious diktats demanded they wore while under the jihadists’ rule. Some of the women with exhausted children in tow nervously kept their faces covered.

As I photographed one boy, I couldn’t help notice that each and every family carried the meagre belongings that they had managed to grab before escaping. For most it amounted to no more than a few bags and blankets.

Carried from the bus by one of her grandsons, 90-year-old Khatla Ali Abdallah was tenderly placed on the ground among her bags. This was the final stage of her harrowing and exhausting journey from west Mosul.

Living for the most part in a basement with only her chickens for company, she survived battles the likes of which never existed even during the turbulent years of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. “I’m very tired, it has been a long way,” Khatla told the young female aid worker who knelt down to offer the old lady bottled water.

Reaching for the bottle, Khatla first kissed the girl’s hand, expressing her thanks for the help.

Khatla’s remarkable tale of fortitude and resourcefulness at its height involved being carried by her grandsons, under sniper and mortar fire, before making the town of Hammam Alil.

“I was carried like a bride at her wedding,” Khatla told those eager to hear her story.

“What will happen to you now?” I asked, as she sat on top of her bags outside Chamakor Camp.

“When the fighting is finished, my grandsons will carry me back again,” she told me matter-of-factly.

Many more youngsters arrived that same day as Khatla, two generations thrown together by the tide of war. Among them, one little boy stood out.

He could not have been more than 10 years old and from the moment he stepped from the bus, it was clear the trauma of the terrifying journey he had undertaken had taken hold of him.

Tears streaming down his cheeks, there was a terror and helplessness in his eyes. His pain was heartbreaking to witness, his vulnerability overwhelming.

In the chaos of arrival and immediate efforts by aid workers to take him under their wing, I never did find out his name. All I could subsequently establish was that he too was from west Mosul and had fled with his family.

Scurrying out of the city under fire, confusion and panic all around, he had become separated from his loved ones.

As I watched him weep uncontrollably, I found it hard to imagine the pain and anxiety he must be going through. One little boy lost amid war and cast adrift from his parents, now facing a future as uncertain as Iraq itself.

He will not be the last of the innocents here caught up in the cauldron of war. This was a war not of their making but one brought to them. It will be some time yet before it leaves their lives.

Only With the Heart – War Photographs
Sogo Arts, 82-86 Saltmarket, Glasgow, G1 5LY
Opens Sunday September 8, 12 noon-6pm
then 10am-6pm daily except Monday

A BBC documentary on David Pratt's work will be screened in the near future