“My parents instilled a belief that there are no limits, that we could succeed in whatever field we chose,” she says. All of Hakim’s siblings, including a younger sister, have since carved successful careers.īut it’s Hakim whose profile is highest, with accolades including the United Nations Media Peace Prize, and reporting everywhere from Yemen and Libya to northern Iraq and, earlier this year, northeast Syria – a long deployment that saw her donate her expressed breast milk to Syrian refugees. The Hakims spent two years in Pakistan before being sponsored by architect Syed Sibtain and his journalist wife (and Sydney Morning Herald crossword compiler) Nancy, to settle in Australia in 1986. “Now when I arrive, I’m picked up on the tarmac, and whisked away.” “That first trip was very difficult for me, but it was the beginning of a 12-year reporting relationship that continues to this day,” says Hakim, whose easy warmth and palpable sense of responsibility towards the Afghan people has won her the moniker ‘Daughter of the nation’. Her Yalda Hakim Foundation partners with the American University of Afghanistan to support the advancement of exceptional, often disadvantaged, young women in Afghanistan. In 2013, she interviewed Hamid Karzai, then President of Afghanistan. Today, the multilingual Hakim is a star in her birthplace, which she revisited in 2008 to film a report on the damaged capital of Kabul, reuniting with her paternal grandparents in the process. They didn’t understand why I’d want to return to the country we’d escaped in search of a better life.” Her reports feature on the BBC News Channel and BBC Two’s Newsnight. “So when I said I was going to Afghanistan, they were very concerned,” says Hakim, who’s reported from across the world for Dateline and SBS World News in Australia and, for the past seven years, for BBC World News, presenting the flagship program Impact, and producing documentaries for the Our World series. My parents knew that if we were captured we would be killed. “He was an architect, and avoiding conscription. “My father told my siblings we were on an adventure,” says the award-winning television journalist, 37, from the north London home she shares with her partner and one-year-old son. For 10 days they travelled overland, Hakim and her mother on one horse, her older brother and sister (aged seven and nine) on another, and her father walking ahead. Yalda Hakim was just six months old when her family fled Afghanistan for Pakistan during the Soviet-Afghan War.
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