



1 / 15 Chevron Chevron Photograph by Andrea DiCenzo A fighter arrives at Sehida Sarya field hospital. Al-Hasakah, Syria, March 24, 2016. For photographs of patients brought in by ambulance, DiCenzo obtained permission from subjects after their conditions had stabilized.

Images of war are too often shaped by meddlesome commanders dictating what can be photographed and what cannot. Some of their concerns are legitimate: pictures showing military installations near road signs or other landmarks, for instance, might assist an enemy in targeting an attack. But on the shifting battlefields of Syria and Iraq, where disparate groups fighting ISIS (and sometimes one another) compete for territory and recruits, as well as for funding, weapons, and sympathy from abroad, officers routinely seek to prevent honest portrayals of their units, preferring to project only virtue, valiance, and political objectives that are in tune with those of their benefactors. For photographers working in such areas, defying these commanders’ whims carries the threat of deportation or detention, accusations of espionage, or worse. Their subjects are their only shield against Islamic State soldiers and spies.

On a recent visit to northeastern Syria, the American photographer Andrea DiCenzo found her access diminishing, practically with each click of the shutter. She had embedded with Kurdish fighters belonging to the People’s Protection Units, known in Syria as the Y.P.G. As with many militant groups in the region, the Y.P.G. exalts its martyrs; soldiers who die in battle are immortalized in airbrushed portraits on posters and flags. But DiCenzo chose to focus, instead, on the wounded. “Death can easily lend itself to romanticization,” she told me. There is no glory in injury, however, only vulnerability and pain.

DiCenzo began at the Sehida Sarya field hospital, an understaffed, poorly stocked medical facility on the outskirts of the city of Al-Hasakah. Prior to the war, the building had served as a driving school. Now, when Hyundai vans arrive in the yard, having shuttled wounded men away from the front lines against ISIS, someone rings a little bell near the front door as if summoning help for a customer who has just walked into a shop. According to DiCenzo, because of shortages in funding the doctors at the hospital work for free.

Before shooting, DiCenzo obtained permission from the patients and doctors she photographed, who welcomed her efforts to document their struggle. She captured images of an exhausted pharmacist, wounded men being carried on blankets and rusty carts, and recovering fighters bearing permanent, disfiguring scars. One had half of his teeth broken into pointy stubs. This is the damage wrought on flesh and bone by cheap bullets and scrap metal packed into I.E.D.s. One injured fighter told DiCenzo that he had begun his military career with the Y.P.G. when he was fourteen years old. Then a Kurdish commander walked into the building, approached her, and said, “You’ve taken enough photos. You’re done.”

DiCenzo later visited the Martyr Xebat Hospital, in Qamishli, where she was told that she couldn’t photograph the faces of the wounded. She had the impression that this restriction was not about privacy—the fighters she asked raised no objections to her taking pictures—but about Kurdish officers “controlling the image of the organization.” The Kurds are famous for having fighting brigades led and entirely populated by female troops, and journalists and photographers are routinely invited to document them in training and in battle. But, at Martyr Xebat, DiCenzo was asked to keep the faces of wounded women out of her frame. Instead, she captured a bandaged hand propped against a stark hospital wall; peaks and troughs on a heart-rate monitor; martyrdom posters hanging between patient rooms; a portrait of Abdullah Öcalan, the militant Kurdish leader imprisoned in Turkey since 1999, mounted next to the gaping mouth of a C.T. scanner. For DiCenzo, the United States tallies the campaign against ISIS in dollars, drones, and air strikes, while her portfolio reflects a human cost, “a reality of these fighters that is much harder for us, as viewers, to process.”