In the space of two hours, journalist Yalda Hakim covers a world’s worth of territory: wars in Ukraine, Darfur, Iraq and Afghanistan; Islamic State, the Taliban, the situation in Israel-Gaza. Until recently, Hakim was the BBC news channel’s chief presenter. This month, Sky launches a nightly international news show – she’s the face. “The BBC is traditional,” she says of the move, “as establishment as it gets for decisions, process and bureaucracy. I stayed for 11 years. I loved my time there. But I believe in reinvention.” Weeks before we meet, she’d been in Jerusalem – her first gig on new turf. Hakim finished up at the Beeb on 6 October, the day before violence flared in the region. Flying into the action felt far more comfortable than being off air, blissed-out at a private member’s club country house as she was when the story was breaking. “It was such grim news, of course,” she says, “but it felt so strange to not be working on it. I didn’t know what to do with myself.”
It’s no surprise that Hakim is an authoritative voice on global affairs. At 40, she’s part of a new generation of broadcasting big hitters. What’s striking, however, are the stories she opts to tell during our lunch: the names she recalls; the details remembered. Each anecdote centres on the so-called ordinary people she’s met during nearly 20 years in the field. There’s the heroic paragliding divorcee in Mosul, murdered by Islamic State for resisting their rise. An afternoon standing graveside with a grieving woman in Kurdish-controlled Syria, who sang for her lost child. How on one trip, five months after her own son was born, she left bags of her freshly pumped breast milk with a fleeing young mother.
Hakim lives with her husband, Abed Rashid, an engineer, and their four-year-old son in London. She riffs on most of this century’s greatest crises and conflicts, making almost no mention of famous faces or world leaders. That’s despite the fact she has done set-piece sit-downs with presidents, prime ministers and all sorts of senior politicos – her skewering of Tobias Ellwood MP, after he appeared to praise the Taliban by suggesting Hakim should visit Afghanistan ahead of passing judgment on its leadership, a particular, deftly handled highlight.
“Two things are at the centre of what I do,” she says. “Yes, I hold those in power to account, but I also try to humanise world events, so those in them aren’t just the ‘other’ in faraway places. I don’t think about these people as stories – I can’t. I have friends across the world who have been in my films. I don’t walk into a room with a camera and start filming. We talk, share our lives and break bread together. It’s never an in-out job with me.”
Empathy is at the heart of Hakim’s approach. “Looking for the stories that are not making the headlines. My own personal experience means I see these things from a completely different lens to many of my peers.” Hakim was born in Kabul in 1983 to Afghan parents who were forced to flee to Sydney for their safety when she was a baby. A few years back, on a trip to Iraq as IS were being forced into retreat, Hakim found herself spending the night in an enclave under the control of the Iraqi military. “I walked in and we were in someone’s home – coffee cups were in the sink, pictures on the walls, toys in the bedroom. A woman’s prayer mat, clothes half-hanging out of a cupboard, her bed still creased from an interrupted night.” That’s where Hakim slept that night. “I lay there thinking: ‘Who is this family? Where are they? Will they ever return to their home? And, if I were them, how would I want this story told?’ I take that responsibility seriously.”
At a push, Hakim remembers the day, at three-and-a-half years old, that she arrived with her family arrived in Sydney. “Otherwise, I’ve no memories of what happened before,” she says. “I only knew about my parents’ experiences through snippets they shared over the years. They were stoic, wanting to get on with raising their four kids, putting that period behind them.”
Four years before Hakim was born, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan as the insurgent mujahideen fought for control. When she was six months old, the family made their escape late in the night: there were false medical letters, disguises, and requests for help that were refused. Eventually, people smugglers set them on a path towards Pakistan. Hakim’s mother, who was then only 27, worked for an Austrian NGO in the Swat Valley, while her father, an architect, set up shop temporarily in Islamabad.
“Dad was desperate for us to get out,” Hakim says, “and ambushed the Australian high commissioner to Pakistan every other week in the hope of securing the necessary paperwork. Dad made contact with an Australian architect and asked him to sponsor us, but he declined.” Thankfully, his wife was convinced to secretly fill in their forms regardless and they made it to New South Wales. Through adolescence, this history wasn’t one Hakim appreciated. “As a kid, I think I was trying to be…” a pause. “Vanilla is the wrong word, but normal. To have a life that was just like every other child in my middle-class, mostly white Sydney suburb. Instead, at home we talked geopolitics, went on protest marches, ate Afghan food and spoke strange languages. My parents would often remind me how they’d taken us out of Afghanistan. Not paying attention at school? ‘Yalda, we had to fight to get you here.’ I’d be like, ‘As if that’s my problem. I didn’t ask you to.’ Yawn. Typical teenage stuff.”
Only decades later did Hakim understand what her family had been through. “I spent hours interviewing my dad last year,” she explains, “and I heard more of their experience, the cycle of war and instability and migration. It was the first time I realised there was trauma that they’d not overcome. It’s so ingrained in their mind: fleeing in the dead of night. Now I often find myself thinking about them when I cover stories of displacement – the strength it takes to protect a family. And how fearless my parents were. Dad ambushing the ambassador, asking a total stranger to sponsor us. Arriving in Sydney and making the most of every opportunity. They were bold. I try to follow in their footsteps.”
Chutzpah is in Hakim’s DNA. At seven, she wrote in her diary that she wanted to be a journalist. She was being published by her local paper by 14, and while studying journalism she was involved with student media. For Hakim, frankly, it felt like small-fry. “I wanted to be on Dateline,” she says, unabashed, “the oldest and most respected current affairs show in Australia.” Hakim undertook a week of work experience there during her fresher’s year, at 19. She’s vague as to whether anyone had actually accepted her application. “After that, I wanted to stick around, so I went to the executive producer’s office and asked, but he wasn’t interested.” Somewhat insistent, Hakim was still making her case 45 minutes later.
“After a lot of haranguing, he relented: if I could get myself into the building, he would turn a blind eye.” It was the early 2000s, the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were top of the news agenda. Hakim is fluent in Persian, Dari, Hindi, Urdu and Pashto, and knew the region better than many of the senior staffers. “Whenever I didn’t have lectures, I’d go to the office, having convinced one of the journalists to let me in. People would drop documents on my desk, which I would condense. I’d translate and log VHS tapes. I made myself indispensable.” Eighteen months later, she was on the channel’s trainee programme. She completed her degree remotely.
Hakim learned how to self-shoot stories while on assignment in remote Aboriginal communities. “But mostly I was chasing ambulances and covering bushfires.” Major international beats sounded far more appealing. “Of course, nobody at the network was going to send me. I was 22, a junior reporter.” It didn’t stop her. She booked annual leave, packed a camera and flew herself to India. Mum and Dad were told by their daughter that she was on assignment. “From there I called my parents and told them the station was sending me to Kabul.” Another lie. Her parents flipped out, and flew to India to confront her. Somehow, she convinced them to join her in Kabul, where her father reluctantly took on the roles of driver, fixer and translator. Personally, the trip was heartbreaking. “My entire life was a build-up to this return, but it was nothing like me or my parents expected. Mum and Dad had never really seen the city at war.” Professionally, however, it paid off. “The channel lost it when I returned. They were angry and made it clear they wouldn’t use the material.” That was, until they watched some. “It became my first half-hour documentary, called Yalda’s Kabul. It was their highest-rated show that year.”
By 27 she was a Dateline presenter – the youngest in its history. At an industry event in Brisbane, she got talking to the head of the BBC World Service. “He liked my work and suggested I consider joining.” When Hakim covered the 2012 Olympics in London they met again. “He asked what it would take for me to join. I said, ‘Replicate my job in Australia: documentaries, presenting and reporting.’” CNN was also interested. She was leaning toward heading stateside, when the BBC caught wind and sent a senior exec to meet her in Dubai. She was offered precisely what she’d asked for on the spot and in March 2013 made her BBC debut. In total, she spent 11 years there. Despite occasional protestations, her parents couldn’t be prouder, even if – after risking it all to pull their daughter out of a war zone – she made a career of walking back into them. “I remember coming home from Libya during the Arab uprisings, and finding my mother sobbing in the terminal,” she says. “Even going to the Middle East last week, I didn’t tell them. They’ve accepted it – they know it’s my job. But I don’t think it gets easier.”
Hakim had only recently returned to London from Kabul when, in August 2021, it fell to the Taliban. “We’d filmed a Pulitzer prize-winning photographer, a women’s rights activist, a student and a Taliban fighter,” she says. “I’d seen how province after province was falling.” She was in near-constant communication with contacts in Afghanistan – from fixers and diplomats to the military – and also a handful of female students at the American University of Afghanistan. Back in 2018, she’d set up an educational foundation in the country. “I’ve travelled across Afghanistan and met young women who told me they learned English from watching me,” she says. “Sometimes, I had to convince parents in rural communities to let their daughters study. Kids who’d never left their villages. There’s a weight to that responsibility.”
As the Taliban advanced, Hakim knew the safety and education of these young women was under threat. “We were just a few volunteers in my kitchen,” she explains, “trying to figure out a way to evacuate them. Where do you get planes from? Where do they go? And these weren’t people with visas and documentation.” Night after night, Hakim was hustling hard. (In total, they evacuated close to 850 people.) “Then late on 14 August, we got wind that Kabul was to fall the next day. I felt delusional, and at 4am shut my eyes, briefly. I woke up to a phone call from my editor saying I needed to get into the studio.”
On the tube to Broadcasting House, she texted a Taliban contact. By 9am, Hakim was live on air. “For the next three or four hours, I was interviewing people, many of whom I’d known for years. Everyone was devastated. We saw images of people rushing to the airport; falling out of planes. I was mid-interview with a former ambassador to Afghanistan when my phone rang.” It was the Taliban.
That period was the most strenuous of Hakim’s career. Simultaneously anchoring the BBC’s rolling news coverage, supporting the women in her care, all while watching a country she knows intimately being dragged back to darker days. It was a gruelling time. “But I’ve learned the art of compartmentalising. I’ve got a job to do – it’s why I like to be above the noise, fray and activism. Women and girls around the world want to know I’ve asked the right questions, not made my feelings the story. I have freedom and education. My life could so easily have turned out differently; I understand the privilege I possess.”
So when the Taliban rang, Hakim accepted the call. For 40 minutes, on live TV, she probed their spokesperson with forensic clarity. “It was tough, emotionally,” she says. When people ask how I avoid bringing my views into stories, I can say: ‘Look at that day. There’s never going to be a story I feel more connected to. But my job is to address the concerns of the audience, regardless of my outlook or experiences. This was who the world wanted to hear from. I put tough questions to them, then heard them out. I’ve always said the same thing to the Taliban, to Islamic State, to militants, whoever: do good or bad, and I’ll point my camera your way; tell me the truth, and I’ll report it.”
The World with Yalda Hakim airs Monday to Thursday at 9pm from 22 January on Sky News, Freeview channel 233
Yalda wears pale pink draped dress by tove-studio.com; styling by Hope Lawrie; hair and makeup by Hanan Phylactou; photographer’s assistant Dan Landsburgh; shot at Jet studio
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