Newlyweds Nada Merhi, 18, and Hassan Youssef, 27, took a series of striking wedding photos in Homs, a city in Syria ravaged by the ongoing civil war. The bride wore a traditional white wedding gown and the groom, a soldier in Syrian President Bashar Assad’s army, wore his uniform as they posed amid rubble and bombed-out buildings.
Homs was once a bustling city with a population of over 600,000, according to the Washington Post. When the rebels opposing Assad took the city in 2011, it became the center for continuous military assault by government forces, sending tens of thousands of citizens fleeing toward the Turkish border and transforming the city into a ghost town.
Joseph Eid, a photographer with Agence France-Presse, said that the couple’s photographer, Jafar Meray, told him he wanted the photos “to show that life is stronger than death.”
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