This photo won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize as part of a package submitted by the Associated Press. It is described this way:
A gunman, center left, holds a pistol to the head of an Iraqi election worker lying in Baghdad's Haifa Street on Sunday. The man kneeling at right is also an election worker who was pulled from the car.
This is the story behind the photograph.
One of the Pulitzer photographs carried the credit line "stringer." Fearing deadly reprisals, the photographer remained unidentified after he photographed insurgents, pistols in hand, murdering election workers. Tipped by a colleague about burning vehicles in a city street, the photographer went to the scene and found two cars that were bombed. One continued to burn. Others in the street directed traffic away from the scene. The photographer left his cameras in his car some distance away and sought information from the crowd. "None of your business," he was told. He returned to his car, at which time an explosion nearly knocked him down. He turned and saw armed men in the intersection attacking election workers. Using his camera with 400-mm lens, he shot the scene as two of the election workers were shot to death in the intersection.Tonight when you go to bed, I want you to think about those two election workers. I want you to think about how boring our voting process is. So much so that half of us don't even bother to vote. I want you to think about a people willing to risk a terrifying death to work at the polls. And they paid for it with their lives.
And I want you to think about another thing. The men who shot these people in cold blood do not deserve to walk on this earth. They are evil. We throw that word around alot here until it means nothing. But it does mean something. It means no conscience. It means deliberate innocent death. It means hating a free election so badly that they would drag men out of their cars and execute them in the middle of the street.
This is who we fight and this is why we fight.
via Alive In Baghdad
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