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" Associated Press photographer Rodrigo Abd is no stranger to conflict. In his ten years with the AP he&amp;#039;s been all over the world, covering things such as political unrest in Bolivia, the earthquake in Haiti, Libya&amp;#039;s civil war, American troops in Afghanistan, and, last year, the Syrian conflict, for which the team of photographers he was part of were awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Now back living in Peru and counting down to fatherhood, we caught up with him for an inside look at what it was like to document and live behind the lines in one of the most dangerous places on Earth. I wanted to be a journalist, not a photographer. So I studied communication in Argentina, my country. The idea was to be a writer, but I made some trips to Bolivia and Peru taking pictures and I fell in love with photography. I realized I could do better journalism with my camera rather than with my pen.  The thing with the financial crisis in the industry is it&amp;#039;s becoming harder to travel like before. We were travelling constantly, now we get into how much it costs, and it depends on how big the story is. Right now, I have plans to more or less continue doing what I do. The thing about living in Latin America, it&amp;#039;s not like I am constantly in a dangerous situation, you know?  I go with a fresh eye. For me it&amp;#039;s really important to capture the feeling and atmosphere of a place in calm, daily-life situations. It&amp;#039;s a combination of taking pictures of explosions for the mass media, but also trying to capture those normal things. I&amp;#039;ve been in really dramatic situations. I thought we were going to be trapped in a city where the Syrian army was defeating the rebels, and we were with the rebels, so we thought that we were going to be killed or captured. We had to escape very quickly in the middle of the night in the middle of fighting, because the city was going to be destroyed. Syria was the hardest. Now they have a corridor where journalists go from Turkey to Syria, but we went in in the back of a truck with smugglers, crossed a river and waited for somebody to pick us up in a car to hide us in a house. I covered it with Ahmed Bahaddou. He&amp;#039;s covered the civil wars in Africa, in Iraq, he&amp;#039;s covered everything, and he was afraid. So I was like, &amp;quot;okay, if this guy is afraid...&amp;quot; The New York Times reporters we talked to who had been there before us went in on donkeys, and they were walking for hours, so we knew we had to be really, really light. I had my sleeping bag, just a few clothes. I even left the (bullet proof) vest behind because it&amp;#039;s so heavy. When I covered Syria it was weird because on one hand you have these young people with the Free Syrian Army trying to help you all the time. They give you a place to sleep, they invite you to eat, they&amp;#039;re so nice. But on the other hand, you have some people who were really skeptical of us being there and wondering why were we taking pictures. They thought we were spies. I learned a lot about values. I learned a lot about human beings, basically. You see incredible latitudes... You can see horrible human beings, but also those trying to help each other, trying to help you as a journalist, protecting you, and it makes me feel that what I&amp;#039;m doing is not only for my job, but it&amp;#039;s teaching me. It&amp;#039;s the university of life. The phones didn&amp;#039;t work. They may work for two minutes, and it was winter and you&amp;#039;d be freezing on the roof of a building trying to file five pictures for five hours by email. It was dangerous because the Syrian army has a way of checking the satellite phone signal and locating it. Sometimes we would try to buy food to keep where we were staying, like tuna and Bisquick and milk, we would do our best to be prepared. In general the Syrians are very, very generous with food, they would invite us all the time to eat with them, and wouldn&amp;#039;t even allow us to pay them. It was a really cheap assignment in that respect! There was a lot of humanity. To see people trying to build something important, fighting for democracy, to change this regime... It makes me really proud of people who are trying to fight for an idea or a better life for them and for their family. It&amp;#039;s more complicated than before. When we covered Syria, the rebels were a bunch of fighters trying to stop the tanks with Kalashnikovs, and the Syrian army was winning easily. Now the rebels receive a lot more weapons, and it&amp;#039;s more complicated to cover the story because there are different factions of rebels. There&amp;#039;s not just one group fighting against the Syrian army, there are a lot of groups, and I&amp;#039;m told that sometimes they&amp;#039;re even fighting each other. If you&amp;#039;re a journalist, you really don&amp;#039;t know who you&amp;#039;re supposed to trust in situations like that. I don&amp;#039;t think military involvement is a solution. It&amp;#039;s not even a solution to give weapons to the rebels. It&amp;#039;s not making any progress on the ground, it&amp;#039;s just making the situation more complicated. I didn&amp;#039;t have the feeling that there was any nationality that people were less friendly towards. We saw an Italian woman, I saw a guy from Norway. I think there was tension because we were in a place of war, but not because of any particular nationality. The editors realized we could be nominated for the Pulitzer with a bunch of pictures from five different photographers. It taught us that we can work as a team showing a very difficult story like Syria in a powerful way. I should say, with only my pictures I would never win the Pulitzer Prize! I don&amp;#039;t do this for money or to be famous. I started doing this because I believed it&amp;#039;s important. Somebody has to document not only wars, but political crisis, economic crisis, not only for now but for history. Somebody is going to wonder, &amp;quot;what happened to these I-don&amp;#039;t-know-how-many people killed in Syria because of toxic weapons,&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;how many refugees were there?&amp;quot; When your children read a history book in fifty years, Syria and Afghanistan are going to be chapters. The economic crisis in the US will be a chapter. We do it because it&amp;#039;s important. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a25401/what-ive-learned-rodrigo-abd/?src=spr_TWITTER&spr_id=1456_36760151>