Journalist and photographer Lenka Klicperová started her career as a news reporter. From 2004 till 2018 she worked as editor-in-chief of Lidé a Země magazine, one of the oldest periodicals in the Czech Republic which focusses on reportages from abroad.
She’s visited a number of African countries and worked in Angola, Namibia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, Niger and DLR Congo. She visited Afghanistan several times as a journalist. Since 2014 she has focussed on the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
Foto: Antonín Kratochvíl
„Kreminna, trenches of Ukrainian troops, mid-March 2023. It's a clear night, but the trench is dark, the space illuminated only by the flickering flame of a candle. It is twenty minutes to midnight. I am on the zero line, the line of contact between the Russian and Ukrainian troops. An artillery battle is raging all around. I'm scared. The same fear that all soldiers on the zero line have.“
On September 27, 2020, Turkey-backed Azerbaijan invaded the Nagorno-Karabakh region, an enclave controlled by Armenia for the past 30 years. The war was supposed to be a blitzkrieg, yet the Armenians managed to defend themselves for 44 days. The brutal fighting, which the soldiers described as a massacre, was stopped by a ceasefire mediated by Russia. The war claimed about 10,000 dead soldiers on both sides of the conflict and 146 dead civilians. Thousands of people are still missing.
March 2020. Czech Republic was paralyzed by a pandemic of a new coronavirus from China. The borders are closing. Reporter Lenka Klicperová cannot move anywhere – not to war-torn Syria or Somalia. However, the front line is suddenly clearly outlined completely elsewhere – in Czech hospitals. How did Czech doctors cope with a pandemic that affected the whole world? What made them better than the others?
What has been happening in the increasingly confusing Syrian conflict since 2019? Reporters Lenka Klicperová and Markéta Kutilová follow the last battle with the Islamic State, spend time between detained jihadists and their wives, and document the Turkish invasion in North-east Syria.