Bio
Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Rajiv Chandrasekaran is a senior correspondent and associate editor for the Washington Post. His reporting focuses on the war in Afghanistan, where he travels frequently to interview Afghans and Americans involved in counterinsurgency operations. Chandrasekaran has held many positions at the Post including national editor, assistant managing editor, and bureau chief in Baghdad and Cairo. In the months following the September 11, 2001 attacks, he was part of a team of reporters who covered the war in Afghanistan and events in Pakistan. He wrote the award-winning book Imperial Life in the Emerald City, which provides a firsthand view of life inside Baghdad's Green Zone. In 2005, Chandrasekaran took a sabbatical from the Post to serve as the journalist in residence at the International Reporting Project at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington and as a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.
Christopher R. Hill
Christopher Hill is dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. Prior to joining the Josef Korbel School, he served as US ambassador to Iraq. As a career member of the Senior Foreign Service, he has served as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs; US ambassador to the Republic of Korea, Poland, and the Republic of Macedonia; and special envoy to Kosovo.
Hill also served as the head of the US delegation to the Six-Party Talks on the North Korean nuclear issue in 2005. Hill received the State Department's Distinguished Service Award for his contributions as a member of the US negotiating team in the Bosnia peace settlement, and was a recipient of the Robert S. Frasure Award for Peace Negotiations for his work on the Kosovo crisis.
Andrea Mitchell
Andrea Mitchell is NBC's chief foreign affairs correspondent and the host of MSNBC's "Andrea Mitchell Reports." She currently covers foreign policy, intelligence, and national security issues. Mitchell's extensive reports include a 2010 interview with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and a series of exclusive interviews, over the years, with Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Mitchell's travels for NBC have included exclusive reports from North Korea, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Bosnia, Kosovo, Pakistan, and Haiti. Mitchell covered the entire 2008 presidential campaign for "Today," "NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams," "Hardball," "Morning Joe," and "Meet the Press." She is the author of Talking Back, a memoir about her experiences covering five presidents, Congress, and foreign policy. Mitchell received the prestigious Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism and the Leonard Zeidenberg Award for her contribution to the protection of First Amendment Freedoms. She also won the 2010 National Press Foundation Excellence in Broadcast Journalism Award.
David Rohde
David Rohde is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times. He has covered the conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Israel-Palestine, Kosovo, and Bosnia. He is the co-author, with his wife, Kristen Mulvihill, of A Rope and A Prayer: A Kidnapping From Two Sides and the author of Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe's Worst Massacre Since World War II. Currently an investigative reporter at the New York Times, he served as the newspaper's South Asia bureau co-chief in New Delhi from 2002 to 2005.
Encyclopædia Britannica Articles
- bin Laden, Osama
(born 1957, Riyadh, Saud.Ar.) Leader of a broad-based Islamic extremist movement implicated in numerous acts of terrorism against the U.S. and other Western countries. The son of a wealthy Saudi family, he joined the Muslim resistance in Afghanistan after the 1979 Soviet invasion of that country. Following his homecoming, he became enraged at the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf War (1990–91) and, through a network of like-minded Islamic militants known as al-Qaeda, launched a series of terrorist attacks. These acts included the bombings of the World Trade Center in New York City in 1993, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the U.S. warship Cole in Aden, Yemen, in 2000. A self-styled Islamic scholar, bin Laden issued several legal opinions calling on Muslims to take up jihad (holy war) against the U.S., and in 2001 a group of militants under his direction launched the September 11 attacks, which led to the deaths of some 3,000 people. The U.S. thereafter demanded bin Laden's extradition from Afghanistan, where he was sheltered by that country's Taliban militia, and launched attacks on Taliban and al-Qaeda forces when that ultimatum was not met. With the collapse of the Taliban, bin Laden and his associates went into hiding.
- bin Laden, Osama on britannica.com
- Qaeda, al-
Broad-based Islamic militant organization founded in Afghanistan by Osama bin Laden. Its members supported Muslim fighters during the Afghan war of 1979–89; afterward the organization dispersed but continued to oppose secularized Muslim regimes and foreign (notably U.S.) presence in Islamic lands. It staged numerous terrorist attacks, including the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the destruction of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, and a suicide bomb attack against the U.S. warship Cole in 2000. During that time it merged with other Islamic extremist organizations and eventually reestablished its headquarters in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, where it trained thousands of Muslim militants. In 2001, 19 such militants staged the September 11 attacks. The U.S. and allied forces responded by attacking Taliban and al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan, killing and capturing thousands and driving the remainder into hiding.
- Qaeda, al- on britannica.com
© 2010 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
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