Sudarsan Raghavan

Sudarsan Raghavan, the Washington Post’s Cairo bureau chief, has spent the last three decades mostly as a foreign correspondent based in Baghdad, Johannesburg, Kabul, Madrid and Nairobi (twice). He has investigated child slavery and other abuses, reported on presidential elections and authoritarian regimes, refugee crises and viral outbreaks, natural disasters and societal trends in more than 65 countries on four continents. He has extensively covered Islamist movements, global terrorism and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the 9/11 terror attacks and the U.S. military intervention after, the 2003 Iraq invasion and the 1996 rise of the Taliban. He has also covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions, the 2004 genocide in Darfur, Sudan and 17 African wars. As Baghdad bureau chief, Sudarsan ran the Post's largest overseas operation during the Iraq war's most violent years. A 2001 investigation with a colleague exposed abusive child labor practices on West African cocoa farms that led to new US anti-slavery legislation and forced US chocolate companies to tackle the abuses. He joined The Post in 2005 after working for Knight Ridder, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Newsweek. Raised in Los Angeles, Madras and Quebec, he began his career freelancing from the Afghan-Pakistan border and later post-apartheid South Africa.