Souad Mekhennet

Souad Mekhennet in 2017

Souad Mekhennet is an award-winning investigative journalist who has covered some of the most challenging stories of our times for The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Daily Beast, International Herald Tribune, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and German television channel ZDF. Since the early 2000s when she began reporting on major events for syndicate news broadcasts in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq, Souad has become a leading authority on extremism, terrorism, and the rise of populism.

By breaking stories, securing rare access, and leveraging a deep bank of sources, Mekhennet has propelled discourse and understanding of war zones, the recruitment of radicals, human rights abuses, and international efforts to counter extremism.

As a subject matter expert, she has appeared on CNN’s Connect the World with Becky Anderson, CBS This Morning, MSNBC's Morning Joe, BBC World News, ABC News, The Mimi Geerges Show, and numerous other television and radio shows and segments in the US, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.

Souad is also an award-winning author of four books who has lectured at institutions including Harvard's Kennedy School, City University of New York, Columbia University, and the University of Hamburg.  She has appeared as invited speaker at organizations such as the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES) at Harvard, John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences, Women's Forum for the Economy and Society, 9/11 Memorial Museum, the US Department of State's Ralph J. Bunche Library, and the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, among others.

Early life and education

Souad Mekhennet was born in Frankfurt to a working-class family, the daughter of a Turkish mother and a Moroccan father. She grew up principally in Germany, but spent some years of her childhood in Morocco. Raised with cultural and linguistic fluency, she navigated easily between Western and Arab world and sought out ways to bridge them. Her fluency in English, Arabic, German, and French has helped her to explain these differences to a global audience.

At the age of 19, Mekhennet became the youngest person ever admitted to the Henri Nannen School for Journalism in Hamburg, founded by Europe's largest publishing house and considered one of the best schools of journalism in Germany. Her broad 18-month education between 1999 and 2001 encompassed magazine, newspaper, online, radio and television.

In April 2007, Mekhennet earned a Diplom (the German equivalent of a master's degree) from the Johann-Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. Majoring in Political Science, International Relations, History, and Sociology, she completed the two-year degree in half the time and spent part of her studies in Syria and Jordan.

Career

1997 – 2000

In 1997, Souad Mekhennet began her career in media as a reporter and on-air presenter for Hessischer Rundfunk, a public broadcasting corporation in the German state of Hesse. She hosted a political discussion show and another pop music program on HR3 radio. While earning her Certificate of Journalism Training from the Henri Nannen School during this period, Souad concurrently completed several internships at several German news organizations and in Rabat, Morocco with ARD Radio Studio, a member of the largest public broadcaster network in the world.

2001 – 2002

In 2001, Souad began reporting and writing articles for Der Spiegel, a German news website ranked among the most visited in the country. Mekhennet's coming of age as a reporter began on September 11, 2001 when she committed to determining who was responsible for the events of 9/11 that altered the course of history and her career trajectory.  Since that moment, her quest for understanding and truth has carried her into some of the world's most dangerous places, often as the only journalist able to leverage sources among ISIS, al-Qaeda, other extremist groups, and within the global network of security officials dedicated to investigating and countering extremism.

2002 – 2004 (The Washington Post)

In 2002, Souad became an Investigative Reporter for The Washington Post, delving into the backgrounds of the Hamburg cell and the al-Qaeda threat. Working on contract from Baghdad and Germany, she became an integral part of The Post’s coverage of the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. She quickly earned a reputation for being fearless in pursuit of the story, reporting from dangerous conflict zones in Fallujah, securing access to Sunni strongholds and the holiest Shia sites, and finding sources among al-Qaeda and other extremist groups. By 2003, she was covering the war for both The Post and NPR, a public broadcaster and national syndicator to more than a thousand public radio stations in the United States.

2004 – 2013 (The New York Times and ZDF)

From 2004 to 2013, Mekhennet concurrently reported for The New York Times and German public television broadcaster ZDF, Europe's largest television network.  As a member of The Times’ investigative unit covering terrorism, Islam, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, she regularly reported on subjects like war zones, terrorist attacks, deportations, human rights abuses, and secret detention centers while producing defining insights and some of the New York Times’ most distinguished pieces on the Bush administration's war on terror.

Covering terrorism on the ground and from within, Mekhennet has often accepted immense personal risk to conduct interviews with extremist leaders in hostile domains and deliver exclusive interviews and series about terror groups. In doing so, she has accomplished things few journalists were able to do, including conducting in-person interviews with the heads of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Hezbollah. Between 2007 and 2008, she worked on the published series Inside the Jihad in which she and her colleague Michael Moss interviewed various jihadist leaders. Mekhennet was the first journalist to ever interview Abdelmalek Droukdal, the leader of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and the only Western journalist to interview Shakir al-Abssi, the leader of Fatah al Islam, who had been sentenced in absentia for his role in the killing of a US diplomat in Amman.  While reporting on the Arab Spring for The Times, Souad was jailed, interrogated, threatened, and had gun held to head.

It was Mekhennet who broke the story of the CIA's botched rendition of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen misidentified as a terrorist who spent five months in a covert CIA prison in Afghanistan. She was acclaimed for tracking former concentration camp doctor and Nazi war criminal Aribert Heim to Cairo, a journey about which she co-authored the book “The Eternal Nazi” published in 2014. She also authored the column Female Factor in international editions of the International Herald Tribune, writing about issues faced by women in the world of Islam, including politicians, artists, activists, and members of terrorist organizations.

At ZDF, Souad was both reporter and multimedia analyst, providing on-camera commentary and expertise from around the world in hundreds of segments and interviews for print, television, and radio media. She also contributed articles for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a newspaper of record in Germany, and was the presenter for two German radio shows.  The wide range of events and developments she covered included uprisings in the Arab world, floods in Pakistan, acts of terrorism, and conflicts of culture after the arrival of refugees and immigrants from Muslim countries. While at ZDF, Mekhennet helped develop two award-winning documentaries for German television: a two-part film called Nine Eleven, and “Most Wanted Nazi”, an exclusive story about tracking down the perpetrator of horrendous crimes during the Nazi regime.

2014 – Present (The Washington Post)

In 2014, Souad Mekhennet rejoined The Washington Post as an International Reporter and became a member of team that would win an Overseas Press Club award a year later for stories about the flow of foreign fighters to Syria and their impact. In 2014, she also received a Moroccan medal (equivalent to the medal of freedom) from King Mohammed IV for her work as a journalist. Mekhennet broke stories including reporting the death of Abdelhamid Abaaoud (the leader of the group behind the 2015 Paris attacks) 15 hours before confirmation by government and other media outlets. In February 2015, she was The Post's lead reporter on the story that first revealed the true identity of the ISIS militant known as "Jihadi John". She authored numerous other compelling pieces such as “When Terror Strikes the Family of a Terrorism Reporter” after rushing to cover a suspected terrorist attack in Munich in 2016 and learning that her 14-year-old family member was among the dead.

In January 2017, Mekhennet became The Post’s National Security Correspondent and continued to monitor and chronicle the rise of extremism and activity within terrorist networks. During that same year, she received the Daniel Pearl Journalism Award and became the youngest person to ever win it. The next year, Mekhennet's work as an author garnered her the prestigious Nannen Prize (Germany's equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize) and the Ludwig-Borne Prize, one of the most important literary awards of its kind in German-speaking countries. In 2019, she was a member of The Post's team that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for “commanding and courageous coverage of the murder of Saudi-born journalist and Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi inside Saudi Arabia’s Turkish consulate.

In 2020, Souad won her second Citation award from the Overseas Press Club as well as the Simon Wiesenthal Center's International Leadership Award for her essential contributions in conclusively identifying Nazi war criminal Aribert Heim. She was later part of the team that won the 2022 George Polk Award for Journalism for “The Pegasus Project” investigation into the NSO Group that sold hacking spyware to repressive governments to commit human rights abuses.

In addition to her contributions to The Washington Post, Souad Mekhennet has appeared as contributor and subject matter expert on CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and BBC.

Awards, honors & fellowships

In 2009, Souad Mekhennet was named a Top 3 reporter in German-speaking countries by an independent jury of the journalists’ magazine “Medium”. Later that year, the American Council on Germany presented her with a Young Leader Award.

In 2011, she won a Deutscher Fernsehpreis Award, the German equivalent of an Emmy, was invited to participate in the European Young Leaders 40 UNDER 40 Program, and won a Young Leader Award from the American Council on Italy.

In August 2012, Souad earned a Nieman Fellowship from the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Three months later, she was named a “Rising Talent” by Women's Forum for the Economy & Society.

In 2013, Mekhennet became a visiting fellow at both the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

In 2014, King Mohammed IV of Morocco presented Mekhennet with his country's equivalent to the Medal of Freedom and the World Economic Forum named her a “Young Global Leader“.

In 2015, Souad was part of The Washington Post team that won a Citation Award from the Overseas Press Club.

In 2016, Souad became a Fellow of the New America Foundation.

In 2017, Mekhennet won the Hanno R. Ellenbogen Citizenship Award presented annually by the Prague Society for International Cooperation and Global Panel Foundation in honor of dedication to public service. Later that same year, the Center for Public Integrity made her the youngest winner of the Daniel Pearl Journalism Award in recognition of excellence in cross-border investigative reporting.

In May of 2018, Souad won the Nannen Prize, the most prestigious journalism print prize in Germany and the equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize in the United States. A month later, she captured the Ludwig-Borne Prize, a prestigious literary award bestowed upon a German-speaking author in acknowledgement of outstanding performances in reporting. Souad was also nominated for a 2018 Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding by the British Academy (renamed the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding in 2021) for her memoir "I Was Told To Come Alone."

In 2020, Mekhennet earned her second Citation Award from the Overseas Press Club along with an International Leadership Award from the Simon Wiesenthal Center for “integrity and courageous commitment to shining light on forgotten victims of man’s inhumanity to man” after enabling the center and authorities to examine handwritten letters and other evidence that conclusively identified Nazi war criminal Aribert Heim.

In 2022, Souad was a member of the team that won a George Polk Award for Journalism.

Books

Souad Mekhennet is an award-winning author of four critically acclaimed books:

I Was Told to Come Alone: My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad (published by Henry Holt and Co., June 13, 2017)

A compelling and evocative memoir about going to places others do not go, interviewing people others cannot access, breaking down assumptions, and speaking hard truths. Often alone and putting her life at risk, Souad travels behind the lines of the Iraq War, throughout the Middle East and North Africa, in Taliban-controlled regions of Pakistan, and to jihadi outposts to pose tough, nuanced, questions to some of the world's most wanted men. Publishers Weekly called the work “a spellbinding fusion of history, memoir, and reportage” and declared it one of the Best Books of 2017.

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The Eternal Nazi: From Mauthausen to Cairo, the Relentless Pursuit of SS Doctor Aribert Heim (published by Penguin Random House, New York, March 6, 2014)

Co-authors Souad Mekhennet and Nicolas Kulish tell the remarkable story of tracking former concentration camp doctor and Nazi war criminal Aribert Heim. Leaving a horrifying mark on the memories of survivors of the Mauthausen concentration camp, Heim was able to slip away from his dark past in the chaos of the postwar period. Evading capture, he lived in a working-class neighborhood of the Egyptian capital, praying in Arabic, beloved by an adopted Muslim family, and inspiring a manhunt that outlived him by many years.  The New York Times said this book was “brilliantly narrated” while Kirkus Reviews called it “haunting and doggedly researched”.

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The Children of Jihad: The New Generation of Islamist Terror in Europe (published by Piper Verlag GmbH, June 8, 2008)

Authored by Souad Mekhennet, Claudia Sautter, and Michael Hanfeld, this book examines the development of modern radical Islam among adolescents and teenage Islamists in Europe and the Arab-Islamic World. Exploring roots and motivations, the authors share insights gained from speaking in-person with children of jihad, meeting contacts at secret locations, changing cars and mobile phones to access sources, and visiting a Taliban-run college in northern Pakistan to see first-hand how Islamist propaganda exploits opportunities offered by the Internet.

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Islam (published by Arena Publishing GmbH, June 15, 2006)

Co-authors Souad Mekhennet and Michael Hanfeld explore the true nature of Islam beyond radicalism and perception as a religion of violence. Beyond the suicide attacks, terrorism, honor killings, and the intolerance highlighted in the media, this book explores the roots of Islam with a high level of expertise to contribute to communication, peace, and understanding between cultures.

External links

• Souad Mekhennet on Twitter
• Souad Mekhennet on the Muck Rack journalist listing site