A 12-year-old casualty of war recovers in hospital: Alessio Mamo’s best photograph

‘Manal suffered severe burns to her arms and face after a missile explosion in Iraq. Yet in many ways she seemed just like a regular young girl’

When I started to take photographs about 18 years ago, I was more interested in the aesthetics. Then there was a moment when I realised the power of the camera as a tool. On 3 October 2013 there was a huge shipwreck off the coast of Lampedusa. More than 250 migrants from Eritrea lost their lives. I was sent to cover the event, and it was during that assignment that I understood I was interested in telling stories about social injustice, about people’s lives post-conflict.

At first I worked mostly on stories about refugees in Sicily, where I am from, but a few years later I had the opportunity to travel to the Middle East with a friend, the journalist Marta Bellingreri, who is an expert on the region. She was living in Jordan and I joined her there for six months . That is how our project, The Hospital of All the Wars, about the patients at the Médecins Sans Frontières Al-Mowasah hospital in Amman, began.
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