WAR IN PHOTOS

From Iwo Jima to the napalm girl, Iraq to Ukraine, images etched in world history

The girl, naked and screaming, ran directly toward Nick Ut’s camera — and into history.

Her name is Kim Phuc, and the instant the photographer captured her image 50 years ago — in June 1972 — she became more than a victim of a South Vietnamese napalm strike on her hamlet. She was and is an international symbol of that unpopular war, and of the torment inflicted on innocents in all wars.

For nearly a century, the AP has covered war with images.

Some won Pulitzer Prizes, like Ut’s napalm girl, like Eddie Adam’s breathtaking photo of the execution of a Viet Cong prisoner, like Joe Rosenthal’s tableau of Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi.

They and others are engraved in global memory, often resonating in ways that words and video do not.

Some show war’s action — a Palestinian with stone in hand confronts an Israeli tank; Korean refugees crawl over a shattered bridge, like ants; a statue of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein crashes to the ground.

But others focus on the pain — and the losses.

A Marine, bleeding profusely around his neck, is evacuated by helicopter after a bombing in Afghanistan. A man displays scars left by machete-wielding gangs in the Rwandan genocide. A Palestinian woman, her face a mask of fury and grief, brandishes helmets left behind by those responsible for a massacre at the Sabra refugee camp in Lebanon.

All too often, the war photos depict young victims.

Thirty-eight years apart, in Vietnam and Syria, fathers clutch the bodies of their dead children.

In between, in 1994, a 7-year-old boy lies mortally wounded in a pool of blood in Sarajevo.

And then, this year, Evgeniy Maloletka captured the aftermath of the Russian bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine.

Five men carried a pregnant woman on a stretcher. Her pelvis had been crushed; she would not survive.

Her baby was delivered through cesarean section, but it showed “no signs of life,” the AP reported. The baby was dead. The image is one of the defining moments of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and a gruesome reminder of the realities of war.

JOE ROSENTHAL/AP WORLD WAR II: Six Marines from the 28th Regiment, 5th Division raise the U.S. flag on Feb. 23, 1945, atop Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima. Three of the Marines were later killed. The photo won the Pulitzer Prize.

EVGENIY MALOLETKA/AP UKRAINE: A pregnant woman whose pelvis had been crushed during Russian shelling is evacuated March 9 from a Mariupol hospital. She and her unborn child later died.

NICK UT/AP VIETNAM: Kim Phuc tore off her burning clothes after a South Vietnamese plane accidentally dropped napalm on her village in June 1972. The iconic photo won the Pulitzer Prize.

ANJA NIEDRINGHAUS/AP AFGHANISTAN: Injured U.S. Marine Cpl. Burness Britt is lifted onto a medevac helicopter on June 4, 2011, in Sangin, an Afghan town in Helmand province.

JEROME DELAY/AP IRAQ: Civilians and U.S. soldiers pull down a statue of dictator Saddam Hussein during the fall of Baghdad in 2003. Saddam, later convicted, was hanged in 2006.