Souad Mekhennet, a reporter who has been covering radical Islamic movements since shortly after Sept. 11, is a visiting fellow at the Weatherhead Center at Harvard University and a Fellow at the School for Advanced and International Studied (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. Last year, she was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, where she researched the “long-term strategies of terrorist organizations since the Arab Spring.”
Before her Nieman fellowship, Mekhennet worked from 2004 until 2012 as a reporter at The New York Times. From 2010 on, she was also a member of the "female factor team" at the Global edition of The New York Times, writing about news, issues and perspectives related to Muslim women around the world. She worked from 2002 to 2004 for the Washington Post.
Mekhennet has covered war zones, terrorist attacks and the "war on terror," including renditions and human rights abuses, as a member of the investigative unit at The New York Times. She was one of two reporters who broke the story of Khaled el Masri’s rendition case and worked on a series called "Inside The Jihad," where she and her colleagues interviewed members of radical jihadist organizations all over the world. Currently, she works at ZDF (German TV) and has been interviewed by various TV and radio shows in the US and Europe.