Akbar Shahid Ahmed

Akbar Shahid Ahmed

Senior Diplomatic Correspondent, HuffPost

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 across the Muslim-majority world, Europe, Asia and the U.S. 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. Akbar has previously written for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Generation Progress and, in Pakistan, DAWN and Newsline magazine. He has provided expert commentary for MSNBC, CNN, Al Jazeera (English and Arabic), BBC, PBS, NPR, Democracy Now!, CTV News, WNYC and other outlets and 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, 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 Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy. In addition to English, he speaks Urdu, Hindi and French.