
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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In the far northern region of snow-capped peaks, glaciers, rivers and orchards, domestic visitors are earning a bad reputation.
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Copies of a new Urdu edition of Mohammed Hanif's 2008 novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, were seized Monday. Rights groups say it's another sign that freedom of expression is threatened in Pakistan.
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Environmental advocates in smog-choked Lahore say the Pakistani government has long downplayed the problem of air pollution. That might be changing.
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Over half those births will happen in just eight countries, according to the U.N. agency.
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The Karakoram Highway revamp is a key part of China's trade and infrastructure initiative in the region, and local communities' expectations are high.
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We remember the life of Tetsu Nakamura, a Japanese doctor who dedicated decades of his life to helping people in Afghanistan. He was killed by gunmen in eastern Afghanistan earlier this week.
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Pollution and global warming are causing glaciers to melt and form unstable lakes in the north of the country. NPR visits a valley where farms were destroyed by glacial floods.
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An American and an Australian have been freed in Afghanistan as part of a prisoner swap with the Taliban. It could be a sign of movement on peace negotiations.
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A growing number of women and children are becoming entangled in drugs as the country's number of addicts aggressively grows.
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The salt has become trendy in the U.S. But Pakistan hasn't benefited much economically from that popularity. Now, Pakistan's government wants to trademark the salt and cash in.