Hagar Yahia holds her 5-year-old daughter Awsaf, who is suffering from malnourishment from living mainly off of bread and tea, in this Feb. 9, 2018 photo in Abyan, Yemen. Yahia, her husband and eight children fled from their hometown on Yemen’s western Red Sea coast to escape the war, eventually ending up more than 200 miles away in the village of Red Star in the south. Ever since, they’ve struggled to find enough food. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)
Nariman Ayman El-Mofty is a Cairo-based photojournalist for The Associated Press. She joined the AP in 2011 and has since covered top stories and special projects across the Middle East. El-Mofty is part of the AP team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2019 for international reporting based on its compelling coverage of the grinding conflict in Yemen and the ensuing humanitarian crisis, including a series of deep investigative stories, photos, and videos chronicling atrocities spawned by the war. The AP’s investigative reporting on the war in Yemen in 2018 was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and the team also won the 2019 Michael Kelly award. El-Mofty also won the Overseas Press Club’s Olivier Rebbot Award for her coverage of the Yemen war and was a 2017 Magnum Foundation fellow.
Quick links to POY Asia 2021 Judges: Khalil Hamra / Shiho Fukada / Anshika Varma / Bryan van der Beek / Suejin Shin / Jiro Ose / Rena Effendi / Abir Abdullah / Nariman Ayman El-Mofty / Wonsuk Choi
Ethiopian migrants line up to board a small boat in the uninhabited coast outside the town of Obock, Djibouti, determined to reach oil-rich Saudi Arabia. In a statement released Thursday, Aug. 13, 2020, New York-based Human Rights Watch accused Yemen’s Houthi rebels and rival Saudi border guards of killing several dozen Ethiopian migrants in an incident at the border in April 2020. Thousands of East Africans make the perilous journey from the Horn of Africa to Saudi Arabia through war-torn Yemen every year, hoping to escape poverty and instability in their home countries. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)
"A good picture moves something inside you — your senses are heightened from it."
Nariman Ayman El-Mofty
In this Aug. 1, 2019 photo, Ethiopian migrants, from center background to right, Gamal Hassan, Abdu Yassin, Mohammed Hussein, and Abdu Mohammed, who were imprisoned by traffickers for months, eat rice from a bowl on the floor, at the Ras al-Ara Hospital in Lahj, Yemen. They said they were fed once a day with scraps of bread and a sip of water when they were held. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)
Kahlan, a 12-year-old former child soldier, demonstrates how to use a weapon, at a camp for displaced persons where he took shelter with his family, in Marib, Yemen in this July 27, 2018 photo. Houthi rebels took Kahlan and his classmates, promising to give them new school bags, but instead they were enlisted and trained as fighters tasked with carrying supplies to the front lines. There, he had to elude explosions and airstrikes that left mangled casualties on the battlefield. “The sight of the bodies was scary,” he said. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)
