Diaa Hadid

Diaa Hadid has covered South Asia and Afghanistan from NPR's bureau in Mumbai since October 2023. She previously spent 6 years in NPR's Islamabad bureau, where she covered Pakistan and Afghanistan. Her favorite stories are about people and moments that capture the complexity of the places she covers.

In India, Hadid has investigated the black market for human eggs fueled by impoverished women; the rise of Chinese weaponry in Pakistan's arsenal as it fought India in May 2025, and she's exclusively reported on the existential threat facing Tibetans in exile: plummeting fertility rates. 

She's parsed the cosmopolitan background of the New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and covered the first known book documenting the food traditions of one of South Asia's most oppressed castes, Dalits, despite the subcontinent having a rich culinary literary tradition. She's investigated the roots of the iconic dish butter chicken (spoiler alert: a dish likely invented for British colonial forces stationed in the then-garrison city of Peshawar). 

On a stint in Damascus in 2024, Hadid exclusively revealed that security forces took more than 300 children who were detained alongside their mothers and funneled them into care houses across Damascus, including a branch of a global charity headquartered in Austria, SOS Children's Villages, where directors kept their identities secret even from relatives searching for them. 

In Pakistan, Hadid and her team won a 2019 Edward R. Murrow Award for hard news for their story on why abortion rates in Pakistan are among the highest in the world. 

Hadid has documented the challenges Pakistan faces as one of the world's most vulnerable countries to the impacts of climate change, from the Himalayas, down the Indus River, to the Arabian sea. She's boated to villages after floods in mid-2022 left a third of the country underwater. She's hiked up snowy mountains to see how residents of a remote Himalayan district are reviving an ancient tradition of glacier mating to grow ice babies to replace the ones that are rapidly melting away. 

In Afghanistan, she's met young men celebrating the Taliban's victory over their Afghan rivals, two decades in the making, and young women who read Anne Frank in a secret book club in defiance of their Taliban rulers. 

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 much of the Arab Spring and its subsequent upheaval, from the idealistic youth in Tahrir Square in Cairo to the collapse of Muammar Gaddafi's rule in Libya from the capital, Tripoli. From the Kurdish Iraqi city of Erbil, she covered massacres committed by the Islamic State in northern Iraq against Shiites and Yezidis, and, from Beirut, she was the first to report on widespread malnutrition and starvation inside a besieged rebel district near Damascus.

She also reported 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.

Hadid was raised in Canberra, Australia 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.

You can see Hadid's photos on Instagram.