Diaa Hadid
Diaa Hadid chiefly covers Pakistan and Afghanistan for NPR News. She is based in NPR's bureau in Islamabad. There, Hadid and her team were awarded a Murrow in 2019 for hard news for their story on why abortion rates in Pakistan are among the highest in the world.
Hadid has also documented the culture war surrounding Valentines' Day in Pakistan, the country's love affair with Vespa scooters and the struggle of a band of women and girls to ride their bikes in public. She visited a town notorious in Pakistan for a series of child rapes and murders, and attended class with young Pakistanis racing to learn Mandarin as China's influence over the country expands.
Hadid joined NPR after reporting from the Middle East for over a decade. She worked as a correspondent for The New York Times from March 2015 to March 2017, and she was a correspondent for The Associated Press from 2006 to 2015.
Hadid documented the collapse of Gadhafi's rule in Libya from the capital, Tripoli. In Cairo's Tahrir Square, she wrote of revolutionary upheaval sweeping Egypt. She covered the violence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria from Baghdad, Erbil and Dohuk. From Beirut, she was the first to report on widespread malnutrition and starvation inside a besieged rebel district near Damascus. She also covered Syria's war from Damascus, Homs, Tartous and Latakia.
Her favorite stories are about people and moments that capture the complexity of the places she covers.
They include her story on a lonely-hearts club in Gaza, run by the militant Islamic group Hamas. She unraveled the mysterious murder of a militant commander, discovering that he was killed for being gay. In the West Bank, she profiled Israel's youngest prisoner, a 12-year-old Palestinian girl who got her first period while being interrogated.
In Syria, she met the last great storyteller of Damascus, whose own trajectory of loss reflected that of his country. In Libya, she profiled a synagogue that once was the beating heart of Tripoli's Jewish community.
In Baghdad, Hadid met women who risked their lives to visit beauty salons in a quiet rebellion against extremism and war. In Lebanon, she chronicled how poverty was pushing Syrian refugee women into survival sex.
Hadid documented the Muslim pilgrimage to holy sites in Saudi Arabia, known as the Hajj, using video, photographs and essays.
Hadid began her career as a reporter for The Gulf News in Dubai in 2004, covering the abuse and hardships of foreign workers in the United Arab Emirates. She was raised in Canberra by a Lebanese father and an Egyptian mother. She graduated from the Australian National University with a B.A. (with Honors) specializing in Arabic, a language she speaks fluently. She also makes do in Hebrew and Spanish.
Her passions are her daughter, photography, cooking, vintage dress shopping and listening to the radio. She sings really badly, but that won't stop her.
Meet Hadid on Twitter @diaahadid, or see her photos on Instagram. She also often posts up her work on her community Facebook page.
-
Three Afghan female journalists were killed in the eastern part of the country on Tuesday. It's part of an on-going wave of assassinations aimed at journalists and human rights activists.
-
The pandemic has slowed efforts to eradicate the contagious disease. Yet the country's polio effort offers insights on the launch of its coronavirus vaccine campaign. -
Zindagi Tamasha has come under fire for its portrayal of a its Muslim cleric. Critics add it to a growing list of entertainment shelved this year in response to outcries from the religious right.
-
The country had nearly annihilated polio before conspiracy theories gave the disease room to spread. An army of health workers is set to give coronavirus vaccines too — if Pakistanis will take them.
-
The fifth most populous country has put strategies in place to address anti-vaccine sentiment and prevent elites from using their influence to obtain government vaccines.
-
Journalist Daniel Pearl's beheaded body was found in a shallow grave in the Pakistani port city of Karachi in 2002. The murder conviction of Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh was overturned last year.
-
Pakistan's Oscar submission for the best international feature category is a film that Pakistanis cannot watch — as gatekeepers weed out media that are seen as violating the country's moral code.
-
The U.N. finds that nearly half of all children under age 5 in Afghanistan, a total of some 3.1 million, are facing acute malnutrition. Mothers share their plight to provide the children sustenance.
-
While Israel has already vaccinated half a million citizens against the coronavirus, the vaccine timeline for poor countries will be much longer. We look at Israel, Pakistan and the Philippines.
-
As the U.S. withdraws from Afghanistan after 20 years, it leaves behind a country made worse by the pandemic. The situation for children under five is dire: more than 40% are acutely malnourished.
