18 Facts About Adel Darwish

Adel Darwish is a veteran Fleet Street foreign correspondent and has worked for The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, The Daily Express, The News of The World, The Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday, The YorkShire Post, The Washington Post and The Times, and many international newspapers and publications in North America, Asia and the Middle East, as well as maintaining his online blog and publishing several books.

Adel Darwish is currently the political editor of World Media, Middle East News and The Middle East Magazine, and a regular contributor to The Tribune.

Adel Darwish was born in Alexandria in 1944, during the Second World War, to a family from the Balkans and central Europe.

Adel Darwish's parents are believed to have held British citizenship and lived for years in Britain.

Adel Darwish's father, was postmaster in Alexandria when the local postal service was run by the British government.

Adel Darwish reported on the Dawson's Field hijackings of several aircraft by the Palestinian radical group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, in 1970, and the ensuing Black September clashes in Jordan.

Adel Darwish was sent to Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan and Iraq between 1970 and 1972.

In 1973, Adel Darwish became a Middle East-based correspondent, and went on to cover that year's Yom Kippur War, in which Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Syria attacked Israel to recapture land lost in the 1967 Six-Day War.

Adel Darwish is currently the Political Editor of the Middle East Group, based at the Parliamentary Press Gallery [1] at the House of Commons of the United Kingdom in Westminster.

Adel Darwish was the first journalist in the world to expose Saddam Hussein's missile programme after an explosion in al-Hella, a facility south of Baghdad, killed over 800 people in August 1987.

Adel Darwish's story was printed in The Independent in August 1990 with an agreement from Salinger that ABC News would air the story a few hours later.

The day before, Darwish had published a story on the meeting between the American charge d'affaires, Joseph C Wilson, and Saddam Hussein on 6 August 1990, when the Iraqi President offered to give America oil below market price if he were to annex Kuwait.

Adel Darwish was among the first writers to use the term "Islamists" to refer to Islamic extremists employing violence.

Personally acquainted with most Middle Eastern leaders and statesmen, Adel Darwish had close ties to British Arabists and Foreign Office officials active in the region, known as the Camel Corps.

Adel Darwish worked as a fleet street correspondent and stringer in Jerusalem, Cairo, Tehran, Beirut, Bahrain, and as a roving correspondent in Africa and the Middle East.

Adel Darwish resigned citing disagreements with the organisation's chairwoman and founder, on the issue of neutrality.

Adel Darwish frequently appears as a commentator on the BBC, Sky News and ITN, as well as major American and Canadian networks and Arabic-language television stations, including Nile TV and Kuwait TV.

In 2008, Adel Darwish won the Cutting Edge Prize from the Next Century Foundation's International Council for Press and Broadcasting media council awards, for his contribution to better understanding both in and towards the Middle East.