Nick Paton Walsh
Encyclopedia
Nick Paton Walsh is an award-winning British journalist, who is an international correspondent with CNN, currently serving as their Kabul Correspondent. He has been an Asia and foreign affairs correspondent for the UK's Channel Four News, and Moscow correspondent for The Guardian
newspaper. He is a native of Guildford, England.. He lives in Beirut.
He also covered President Obama's speech about the withdrawal of America's troop surge in Afghanistan, detailing a Taliban resurgence in Nurestan, a booming opium culture in Badakhshan, together with insurgent violence and a resurgent al-Qaeda in Kunar. He also reported from Benghazi on Libya's declaration of liberty after Gadhafi. In September he became CNN's full-time correspondent in Kabul.
Walsh joined Channel Four News at ITN as a foreign affairs correspondent from the Guardian newspaper in September 2006. He covered the Iraq surge both from Washington and Baghdad, and reported from Mosul
and Basra
. He secured an exclusive interview with Russian murder suspect Andrey Lugovoy, on the day the Russian businessman was charged by British police with the murder of Alexander Litvinenko
; worked in Chechnya
and Ingushetia
; covered child soldiers in the Central African Republic
; and climate change in Tajikistan
.
While based in London, he uncovered a series of exclusives for the programme, including the British use of incendiary bombs in Afghanistan; a covert British programme to train the special forces of regimes considered to have questionable human rights records; and Sebastian Coe's controversial description of the Chinese policemen who guided the Olympic torch through London as "thugs".
Walsh was the programme's undercover correspondent in Zimbabwe
, during the 2008 elections. He was one of a handful of western reporters inside the country during the violent crackdown on the MDC
. He also reported the war between Georgia and Russia in July 2008 from both sides of the front line.
In September 2008, Walsh moved to Bangkok
, to become the programme's Asia correspondent. During the Mumbai hotel sieges that November, he got the first interview with the Australian barman held in the Taj Hotel.
In March 2009, Channel Four News ran the first interview in seven years with alleged Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout
. The product of six months of negotiations by Walsh, the interview took place in his remand centre and at the courthouse, where he was facing extradition to the United States. Bout professed his innocence, but also admitted his planes could have run weapons without his knowledge; that he ran guns for the Afghan government in the 1990s; and said he was close personal friends with Jean Pierre Bemba, an alleged warlord on trial in the Hague
for crimes against humanity.
In April 2009, Walsh was part of a Channel Four News team in Sri Lanka
that was deported for their reporting on allegations from the United Nations about sexual abuse in camps for the internally displaced there. The team, including producers Nevine Mabro and Bessie Du, along with cameraman Matt Jasper, had been one of a handful reporting the end of the 25-year war when the military closed in on a tiny strip of land, filled with civilians, in the country's north east, called the No Fire Zone. After three weeks of coverage, the team ran footage secretly filmed inside the camps, into which Tamil
civilians fleeing the fighting had been kept. The report so enraged the country's defence minister, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, that he personally rang Walsh to inform him he and his team would be deported. They were held by police and then taken to the airport, causing the allegations in his report to gain international attention.
While serving as an Asia correspondent, he worked extensively in Afghanistan, including the presidential election crisis of 2009. Embedded across the country in Orūzgān, Helmand, Paktika, Khost
, Nurestan, Kunar
, and Kandahar
, he gained rare access to COP Keating in Nurestan, a tiny American outpost isolated near the Pakistani border, which was overrun by insurgents in October 2009. He also interviewed General Stanley McCrystal, the NATO commander removed for injudicious comments about his civilian superiors. Perhaps presciently, McCrystal told Walsh, when referring to President Hamid Karzai
's recent outbursts, "war is high stress stuff" that often causes people to say rash things.
In a series of exclusives about the British army's conduct in Afghanistan, he revealed the dissatisfaction felt by Afghans who had worked for the UK military as translators in Helmand - men who had been injured on duty but who felt abandoned. He also revealed a trebling in compensation payouts to civilians in Helmand over deaths or injuries mistakenly caused by British forces.
Walsh spent many months in Pakistan, where he reported on the Taliban's infiltration of Karachi
, and on the military's campaign to take Bajaur
. His team also broadcast the first mobile phone footage of a woman being flogged publicly by the Taliban in the Swat Valley, which caused popular outcry in Pakistan.;
He has also organised and reported interviews with Taliban leaders Mansoor Dadullah and Mullah Nasir.
He has also worked on vigilante murders and economic booms in China; on mud volcanoes in Indonesia; migrant workers in Dubai; food exportation from Cambodia; Naxalite
rebels in Chhattisgarh
, India
; and he watched and reported as his office and flat were surrounded by the protests that shook Bangkok in May 2010.
newspaper in 1999, after studying English at University College London
, where he has run the Guardian's "Me and My Motor" column, in which celebrities spoke each week about their car.
He began at the Observer as a researcher on the travel and film sections, before winning the Young Journalist of the Year award from the British Press Gazette
. The winning articles included one on nuclear testing in Kazakhstan
, another on male anorexia, and one on getting malaria in Gambia. The award secured him a place on the home news desk where he worked for 18 months before accepting voluntary redundancy to go and work as the newspaper's stringer in Moscow. He quickly became the Guardian and Observer Moscow correspondent, which position he held for four years.
During that time he was one of two journalists to get inside the grounds of the Nord Ost theatre at the close of the Dubrovka theatre siege
in October 2002.
He covered the popular revolutions in Georgia
, Ukraine
, and Kyrgyzstan
, and their failure in Azerbaijan
and Belarus
.
He was also the Guardian's only correspondent in Beslan
for the brutal hostage crisis at Middle School Number One there. He worked repeatedly inside the North Caucasus
, travelling to Chechnya over twenty times and winning various awards for his reporting there.
Walsh also helped break this story of the disciplining of Craig Murray
, the controversial British Ambassador to Uzbekistan
, who spoke out against the British invasion of Iraq. He also secured the ambassador's first interview for the Guardian and Channel Four News.
He has won a series of awards since joining the staff of the Observer newspaper, aged 21. In 2000 he was the British Press Gazette's Young Journalist of the Year, and four years later was nominated for their Foreign Correspondent award for the Guardian's coverage of the Beslan school hostage crisis. He won Amnesty International's Gaby Rado Award for a reporter at the start of their career in 2006 for his work in the former Soviet Union, and their television award for his work in Sri Lanka in 2010. He also won the Lorenzo Natali Award for human rights reporting in 2006. In February 2011, his work in Kandahar, Afghanistan was part of a body of reports that won Channel Four News the prestigious Broadcast television award for news and current affairs coverage.
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
newspaper. He is a native of Guildford, England.. He lives in Beirut.
Television career
Walsh started working for CNN in March 2011 in Pakistan. He covered the death of Osama Bin Laden as their first reporter in country to the story, obtaining exclusive video of inside the compound and breaking the news that cellphone signals led the CIA to the al-Qaeda leader.He also covered President Obama's speech about the withdrawal of America's troop surge in Afghanistan, detailing a Taliban resurgence in Nurestan, a booming opium culture in Badakhshan, together with insurgent violence and a resurgent al-Qaeda in Kunar. He also reported from Benghazi on Libya's declaration of liberty after Gadhafi. In September he became CNN's full-time correspondent in Kabul.
Walsh joined Channel Four News at ITN as a foreign affairs correspondent from the Guardian newspaper in September 2006. He covered the Iraq surge both from Washington and Baghdad, and reported from Mosul
Mosul
Mosul , is a city in northern Iraq and the capital of the Ninawa Governorate, some northwest of Baghdad. The original city stands on the west bank of the Tigris River, opposite the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh on the east bank, but the metropolitan area has now grown to encompass substantial...
and Basra
Basra
Basra is the capital of Basra Governorate, in southern Iraq near Kuwait and Iran. It had an estimated population of two million as of 2009...
. He secured an exclusive interview with Russian murder suspect Andrey Lugovoy, on the day the Russian businessman was charged by British police with the murder of Alexander Litvinenko
Alexander Litvinenko
Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko was an officer who served in the Soviet KGB and its Russian successor, the Federal Security Service ....
; worked in Chechnya
Chechnya
The Chechen Republic , commonly referred to as Chechnya , also spelled Chechnia or Chechenia, sometimes referred to as Ichkeria , is a federal subject of Russia . It is located in the southeastern part of Europe in the Northern Caucasus mountains. The capital of the republic is the city of Grozny...
and Ingushetia
Ingushetia
The Republic of Ingushetia is a federal subject of Russia , located in the North Caucasus region with its capital at Magas. In terms of area, the republic is the smallest of Russia's federal subjects except for the two federal cities, Moscow and Saint Petersburg...
; covered child soldiers in the Central African Republic
Central African Republic
The Central African Republic , is a landlocked country in Central Africa. It borders Chad in the north, Sudan in the north east, South Sudan in the east, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of the Congo in the south, and Cameroon in the west. The CAR covers a land area of about ,...
; and climate change in Tajikistan
Tajikistan
Tajikistan , officially the Republic of Tajikistan , is a mountainous landlocked country in Central Asia. Afghanistan borders it to the south, Uzbekistan to the west, Kyrgyzstan to the north, and China to the east....
.
While based in London, he uncovered a series of exclusives for the programme, including the British use of incendiary bombs in Afghanistan; a covert British programme to train the special forces of regimes considered to have questionable human rights records; and Sebastian Coe's controversial description of the Chinese policemen who guided the Olympic torch through London as "thugs".
Walsh was the programme's undercover correspondent in Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe is a landlocked country located in the southern part of the African continent, between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers. It is bordered by South Africa to the south, Botswana to the southwest, Zambia and a tip of Namibia to the northwest and Mozambique to the east. Zimbabwe has three...
, during the 2008 elections. He was one of a handful of western reporters inside the country during the violent crackdown on the MDC
MDC
MDC usually refers to:*Movement for Democratic Change – Tsvangirai , a Zimbabwean political party**Movement for Democratic Change , a former Zimbabwean political party that split in 2005 into the MDC-T and MDC-M...
. He also reported the war between Georgia and Russia in July 2008 from both sides of the front line.
In September 2008, Walsh moved to Bangkok
Bangkok
Bangkok is the capital and largest urban area city in Thailand. It is known in Thai as Krung Thep Maha Nakhon or simply Krung Thep , meaning "city of angels." The full name of Bangkok is Krung Thep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahintharayutthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom...
, to become the programme's Asia correspondent. During the Mumbai hotel sieges that November, he got the first interview with the Australian barman held in the Taj Hotel.
In March 2009, Channel Four News ran the first interview in seven years with alleged Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout
Viktor Bout
Viktor Anatolyevich Bout is a convicted arms smuggler. A citizen of Russia, he was arrested in Thailand in 2008 and was extradited in 2010 to the United States to stand trial on terrorism charges after being accused of smuggling arms to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia to use against...
. The product of six months of negotiations by Walsh, the interview took place in his remand centre and at the courthouse, where he was facing extradition to the United States. Bout professed his innocence, but also admitted his planes could have run weapons without his knowledge; that he ran guns for the Afghan government in the 1990s; and said he was close personal friends with Jean Pierre Bemba, an alleged warlord on trial in the Hague
The Hague
The Hague is the capital city of the province of South Holland in the Netherlands. With a population of 500,000 inhabitants , it is the third largest city of the Netherlands, after Amsterdam and Rotterdam...
for crimes against humanity.
In April 2009, Walsh was part of a Channel Four News team in Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka, officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka is a country off the southern coast of the Indian subcontinent. Known until 1972 as Ceylon , Sri Lanka is an island surrounded by the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait, and lies in the vicinity of India and the...
that was deported for their reporting on allegations from the United Nations about sexual abuse in camps for the internally displaced there. The team, including producers Nevine Mabro and Bessie Du, along with cameraman Matt Jasper, had been one of a handful reporting the end of the 25-year war when the military closed in on a tiny strip of land, filled with civilians, in the country's north east, called the No Fire Zone. After three weeks of coverage, the team ran footage secretly filmed inside the camps, into which Tamil
Tamil people
Tamil people , also called Tamils or Tamilians, are an ethnic group native to Tamil Nadu, India and the north-eastern region of Sri Lanka. Historic and post 15th century emigrant communities are also found across the world, notably Malaysia, Singapore, Mauritius, South Africa, Australia, Canada,...
civilians fleeing the fighting had been kept. The report so enraged the country's defence minister, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, that he personally rang Walsh to inform him he and his team would be deported. They were held by police and then taken to the airport, causing the allegations in his report to gain international attention.
While serving as an Asia correspondent, he worked extensively in Afghanistan, including the presidential election crisis of 2009. Embedded across the country in Orūzgān, Helmand, Paktika, Khost
Khost
Khost or Khowst is a city in eastern Afghanistan. It is the capital of Khost province, which is a mountainous region near Afghanistan's border with Pakistan...
, Nurestan, Kunar
Kunar
Kunar may refer to:*Kunar Valley, Afghanistan and Pakistan*Kunar Province, Afghanistan*Kunar River, Afghanistan and Pakistan...
, and Kandahar
Kandahar
Kandahar is the second largest city in Afghanistan, with a population of about 512,200 as of 2011. It is the capital of Kandahar Province, located in the south of the country at about 1,005 m above sea level...
, he gained rare access to COP Keating in Nurestan, a tiny American outpost isolated near the Pakistani border, which was overrun by insurgents in October 2009. He also interviewed General Stanley McCrystal, the NATO commander removed for injudicious comments about his civilian superiors. Perhaps presciently, McCrystal told Walsh, when referring to President Hamid Karzai
Hamid Karzai
Hamid Karzai, GCMG is the 12th and current President of Afghanistan, taking office on 7 December 2004. He became a dominant political figure after the removal of the Taliban regime in late 2001...
's recent outbursts, "war is high stress stuff" that often causes people to say rash things.
In a series of exclusives about the British army's conduct in Afghanistan, he revealed the dissatisfaction felt by Afghans who had worked for the UK military as translators in Helmand - men who had been injured on duty but who felt abandoned. He also revealed a trebling in compensation payouts to civilians in Helmand over deaths or injuries mistakenly caused by British forces.
Walsh spent many months in Pakistan, where he reported on the Taliban's infiltration of Karachi
Karachi
Karachi is the largest city, main seaport and the main financial centre of Pakistan, as well as the capital of the province of Sindh. The city has an estimated population of 13 to 15 million, while the total metropolitan area has a population of over 18 million...
, and on the military's campaign to take Bajaur
Bajaur
Bajaur or Bajur or Bajour is an Agency of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Smallest of the agencies in FATA, it has a hilly terrain. According to the 1998 census, the population was 595,227 but other more recent estimates it has grown to 757,000...
. His team also broadcast the first mobile phone footage of a woman being flogged publicly by the Taliban in the Swat Valley, which caused popular outcry in Pakistan.;
He has also organised and reported interviews with Taliban leaders Mansoor Dadullah and Mullah Nasir.
He has also worked on vigilante murders and economic booms in China; on mud volcanoes in Indonesia; migrant workers in Dubai; food exportation from Cambodia; Naxalite
Naxalite
The word Naxal, Naxalite or Naksalvadi is a generic term used to refer to various militant Communist groups operating in different parts of India under different organizational envelopes...
rebels in Chhattisgarh
Chhattisgarh
Chhattisgarh is a state in Central India, formed when the 16 Chhattisgarhi-speaking South-Eastern districts of Madhya Pradesh gained separate statehood on 1 November 2000....
, India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
; and he watched and reported as his office and flat were surrounded by the protests that shook Bangkok in May 2010.
Newspaper career
Walsh joined The ObserverThe Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
newspaper in 1999, after studying English at University College London
University College London
University College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and the oldest and largest constituent college of the federal University of London...
, where he has run the Guardian's "Me and My Motor" column, in which celebrities spoke each week about their car.
He began at the Observer as a researcher on the travel and film sections, before winning the Young Journalist of the Year award from the British Press Gazette
Press Gazette
Press Gazette, formerly known as UK Press Gazette , is a British media trade magazine dedicated to journalism and the press. It was first published in 1965, and currently has a circulation of about 2,500, although it had enjoyed higher circulations earlier in its history...
. The winning articles included one on nuclear testing in Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan , officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Ranked as the ninth largest country in the world, it is also the world's largest landlocked country; its territory of is greater than Western Europe...
, another on male anorexia, and one on getting malaria in Gambia. The award secured him a place on the home news desk where he worked for 18 months before accepting voluntary redundancy to go and work as the newspaper's stringer in Moscow. He quickly became the Guardian and Observer Moscow correspondent, which position he held for four years.
During that time he was one of two journalists to get inside the grounds of the Nord Ost theatre at the close of the Dubrovka theatre siege
Moscow theater hostage crisis
The Moscow theater hostage crisis, also known as the 2002 Nord-Ost siege, was the seizure of the crowded Dubrovka Theater on 23 October 2002 by some 40 to 50 armed Chechens who claimed allegiance to the Islamist militant separatist movement in Chechnya. They took 850 hostages and demanded the...
in October 2002.
He covered the popular revolutions in Georgia
Georgia (country)
Georgia is a sovereign state in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded to the west by the Black Sea, to the north by Russia, to the southwest by Turkey, to the south by Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan. The capital of...
, Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
, and Kyrgyzstan
Kyrgyzstan
Kyrgyzstan , officially the Kyrgyz Republic is one of the world's six independent Turkic states . Located in Central Asia, landlocked and mountainous, Kyrgyzstan is bordered by Kazakhstan to the north, Uzbekistan to the west, Tajikistan to the southwest and China to the east...
, and their failure in Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan , officially the Republic of Azerbaijan is the largest country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded by the Caspian Sea to the east, Russia to the north, Georgia to the northwest, Armenia to the west, and Iran to...
and Belarus
Belarus
Belarus , officially the Republic of Belarus, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered clockwise by Russia to the northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Its capital is Minsk; other major cities include Brest, Grodno , Gomel ,...
.
He was also the Guardian's only correspondent in Beslan
Beslan
Beslan is a town and the administrative center of Pravoberezhny District of the Republic of North Ossetia–Alania, Russia. In terms of population, Beslan is the third largest town in the republic behind Vladikavkaz and Mozdok...
for the brutal hostage crisis at Middle School Number One there. He worked repeatedly inside the North Caucasus
North Caucasus
The North Caucasus is the northern part of the Caucasus region between the Black and Caspian Seas and within European Russia. The term is also used as a synonym for the North Caucasus economic region of Russia....
, travelling to Chechnya over twenty times and winning various awards for his reporting there.
Walsh also helped break this story of the disciplining of Craig Murray
Craig Murray
Craig John Murray is a British political activist, former ambassador to Uzbekistan and former Rector of the University of Dundee....
, the controversial British Ambassador to Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan , officially the Republic of Uzbekistan is a doubly landlocked country in Central Asia and one of the six independent Turkic states. It shares borders with Kazakhstan to the west and to the north, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to the east, and Afghanistan and Turkmenistan to the south....
, who spoke out against the British invasion of Iraq. He also secured the ambassador's first interview for the Guardian and Channel Four News.
He has won a series of awards since joining the staff of the Observer newspaper, aged 21. In 2000 he was the British Press Gazette's Young Journalist of the Year, and four years later was nominated for their Foreign Correspondent award for the Guardian's coverage of the Beslan school hostage crisis. He won Amnesty International's Gaby Rado Award for a reporter at the start of their career in 2006 for his work in the former Soviet Union, and their television award for his work in Sri Lanka in 2010. He also won the Lorenzo Natali Award for human rights reporting in 2006. In February 2011, his work in Kandahar, Afghanistan was part of a body of reports that won Channel Four News the prestigious Broadcast television award for news and current affairs coverage.