Roba El Husseini

Roba El Husseini is a journalist, having spent the past decade working with the French news agency AFP in Beirut, covering war-torn Syria and crisis-hit Lebanon, relaying breaking news and resulting human tragedies. Roba has reported on numerous military operations launched by various actors in Syria—a country bursting with regional and global powers. She has also deployed multiple times to Syria and Iraq to cover battles against the Islamic State group in Mosul, Raqa, and the jihadists' last stronghold of Baghouz. In Lebanon, Roba covered the unprecedented 2019 protests against a corrupt ruling elite, the deadly Beirut port blast, and years of economic fallout that threaten to push the country into the abyss. She has published long-form, in-depth investigations into the extortion of property from those displaced by the Syrian war, primitive mortuaries known as "salt rooms" in a notorious Syrian regime-run prison, and Captagon – an amphetamine now taking the Middle East by storm. Roba has also reported in Sudan, Iraq and Afghanistan and was recently appointed as AFP's deputy bureau chief in Baghdad. Roba received her BA and MA degrees in international relations from Saint Joseph University in Lebanon.