Akbar Shahid Ahmed

Akbar Shahid Ahmed is the Senior Diplomatic Correspondent for HuffPost, based in Washington, D.C. He can be reached at akbar.ahmed@huffpost.com. A native Pakistani, Akbar has reported from around the globe. He is presently writing a book on the Biden administration's role in the Gaza war for W. W. Norton. Akbar was a 2024 finalist for the Livingston Award American journalisms highest honor for reporters under the age of 35. In 2023, he was chosen for the East-West Center's Korea-United States Journalists Exchange, and in 2022, he won a Boell Transatlantic Media Fellowship to spend the fall reporting in Poland and Lithuania. In 2019, Akbar became the first-ever Pakistani journalist to secure a press credential to report from Israel-Palestine, and was selected as part of the inaugural class of LGBTI fellows at the Atlantic Council. He regularly provides expert commentary for MSNBC and Al Jazeera English, and has also appeared on CNN, BBC, PBS, NPR, Democracy Now!, Al Jazeera Arabic, CTV News, WNYC and other outlets, as well as participated in panels organized by SXSW, Columbia University, the Truman Center for National Security, the University of Southern California, the Stimson Center, the Project on Middle East Democracy, New York University, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Tulane University, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Atlantic Council, the Newseum Institute, the South Asian Journalists Association and others. Akbar is a graduate of Yale University, where he studied global affairs, served as an editor of the Yale Daily News and completed the Studies in Grand Strategy program. In addition to English, he speaks Urdu, Hindi and French.