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.
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President Biden's announcement for U.S. and foreign forces to withdraw from Afghanistan by Sept. 11 appears to have derailed the peace process that was meant to wind down the conflict in that country.
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Months after an Australian army inquiry acknowledged potential war crimes were committed in Afghanistan by members of its elite forces, more Afghan victims are coming forward to demand justice.
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As President Biden faces a decision on whether to withdraw troops from the country, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin went to tour the region himself in a visit to the capital of Kabul.
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Journalist Fatima Roshanian has faced threats before, but she and many other Afghans say the risk to their lives is more serious than ever. "People are being killed everyday, everywhere," she says.
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The U.S. promised to pull all troops out of Afghanistan by May 1 when it signed a deal with the Taliban last year. Now, it looks like it will miss that deadline as peace talks crawl along.
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Mistrust towards China-produced vaccines, general vaccine hesitancy and distribution complications have all been obstacles in getting the vaccine out in some countries.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The Taliban have waged attacks across the country, prompting a call to reduce the violence from Gen. Mark Milley. In Kabul, the public worries about the Taliban's return.