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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Afghan women's rights activists plead with their male classmates to stay home as the Taliban reopen colleges and high schools — for men and boys only.
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Pakistan's economy is on the verge of collapse, and the U.N. warns more than 5 million people will be close to famine by the end of March. Soup kitchens are struggling to meet the growing demand. -
Marian Lewyeka's delightful novel, A Short History Of Tractors In Ukrainian spurred NPR correspondent Diaa Hadid to tell another tractor story — the history of Belarusian tractors in Pakistan. -
Pakistan briefly blocked Wikipedia for what officials described as "sacrilegious" content. It was lifted after it attracted international attention, but other sites remain blocked in Pakistan
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Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who seized power in a bloodless coup and later led a reluctant Pakistan into aiding the U.S. war in Afghanistan against the Taliban, has died. He was 79. -
A storm of global issues, from the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan, has exposed and exacerbated Pakistan's political, economic and security fault lines. -
Pakistan reels from a suicide bombing that killed more than 90 worshippers in a mosque as a delegation from the International Monetary Fund comes to town as the country seeks to avert default.
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A powerful suicide bombing in a mosque in Pakistan has killed at least 59 people and wounded dozens more. Well into the evening, medics dug victims out of the rubble.
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A powerful blast struck on Monday inside a mosque in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar, killing at least 59 people, according to hospital and police officials. -
Pakistan has been struggling to keep its grid up and running in recent months and a recent nationwide blackout showed just how bad the problem has become.
