APAC News Photo Story of the Year

Elke Scholiers

1st Place

No Man's Land

In December 2024, Bashar al-Assad's government collapsed dramatically, ending the Assad family's 50-year-rule of Syria and the country's 13-year civil war. But guns have not fallen silent over all of Syria. In one corner of the country, Kurdish fighters are still fighting their war -- mostly from underground. Beneath the bombed-out, barren remains of Kobani in northeastern Syria, the bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens and tunnels of the Kurdish Women’s Protection Unit are a teeming den of activity where sunlight never reaches. Built over many years by these militiawomen, called the YPJ, and their male counterparts, YPG, the vast network of underground tunnels and overground watch towers stretches for miles beneath the ruined warscape of Kobani and touches the border of Turkey, the avowed enemy of these fighters.

The Kurds, who seek to establish a separate state called Kurdistan in Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey, have been allied with the US in the fight against the Islamic State and the previous Assad regime, but they are deemed terrorist separatists by the Turkish government. Today, Kurdish fighters are still battling the Turkish-backed militia, the Syrian National Army (SNA), and face Turkish airstrikes daily in Kobani. Here is the most dangerous flashpoint of the ongoing Syrian conflict, but it has mostly escaped international attention while all eyes on Damascus and the new regime of former Islamist militant Abu Mohammad al-Jolani. For the Kurdish women fighters, the cold and dark tunnels are a home and shelter while they receive weapons and ideological training -- what they call learning to use "bullets and ideas." For them, the conflict is not just ideological but personal: many saw firsthand the savagery of the Islamic State's fighters who raped, killed and beheaded women, including their friends, during 2014-2019, when the IS controlled this area.

Even today, they fear that al-Jolani, a former ally of the IS, will bring an Islamist-style rule back to Syria and oppose the hard-won freedoms and rights these women enjoy in their enclave, where women can wield authority in the police, in courts and their fighting forces. This project shows the lives of Kurdish women who are at the forefront of the ongoing struggle for Syria -- and what kind of political and social order it will be. I'm the first and only photographer who has ever documented the underground tunnel network in Kobani.

2nd Place

Ezra Acayan

TikTok Live Selling Reshapes Retail In The Philippines.

TikTok Shop, the e-commerce platform within the popular short video app, has spurred a booming live selling industry in the Philippines, where businesses are benefiting from TikTok's prized algorithm to sell more and faster, disrupting the market for other established e-commerce platforms in the region. However, a proposed bill in the Philippine Congress, House Bill 10489, introduced amid geopolitical tensions with China and following similar moves by other countries, aims to ban "foreign adversary-controlled" apps, likely targeting TikTok and could threaten the livelihoods of many Filipinos who have built their businesses on the platform​​​​.

3rd Place

Ezra Acayan

Typhoon Gaemi Hits the Philippines

Monsoon rains, intensified by Typhoon Gaemi, have caused flooding and landslides throughout the Philippines, resulting in at least eight deaths and displacing over 600,000 people. The typhoon, packing winds of up to 162 kph, did not make landfall in the Philippines but enhanced monsoon rains. In the region around the capital Manila, government work and schools were suspended due to severe overnight flooding. The MT Terra Nova, a tanker carrying 1.4 million liters of fuel, sank in Manila Bay during the typhoon, resulting in an oil slick stretching 12-14 km, which resulted in authorities imposing fishing bans that affected the livelihoods of more than 46,000 fishermen.