Souad Mekhennet is an award winning reporter for The Washington Post’s national security desk and author.
She worked previously for The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, and NPR.
Mekhennet was a 2012 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and is a visiting fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies as well as the Geneva Center for Security Policy and was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.
She first reported for The Post in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, delving into the backgrounds of the Hamburg cell and writing on the al-Qaeda threat in Europe, North Africa and the Gulf. She was part of The Post’s coverage of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. From 2004 until 2013 Mekhennet worked at The New York Times where she produced some of the most distinguished reporting on the Bush administration’s war on terrorism and "Inside the world of Jihad."
In 2014 she returned to The Post as a contributor and was upped to staff writer in 2017.
Mekhennet has written four books, most recently her critically acclaimed memoir, "I Was Told to Come Alone: My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad", which the New Yorker described as “an enthralling and sometimes shocking blend of reportage and memoir from the centers of jihadi networks.”
It was included in the 2017 long list for The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, received the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism, in 2018 she received the Henri Nannen journalism award and the "Boerne Preis" one of the highest literature awards in Germany.