Raya Jalabi is the Middle East Correspondent for the Financial Times covering Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

Until March 2022, she was Senior Correspondent for Reuters covering Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, focusing on politics, human rights and the rapid pace of social transformation.

From 2017-2020, she served as the agency’s correspondent in Iraq. She investigated the illicit cross-border transfer of Islamic State detainees by US forces; wrote about the foreign children left behind by Islamic State, the Iraqis deported from the US following the 2017 travel ban and the ravages left by war, among others. She witnessed the emergence of Iraq’s mass protests in 2019, and reported extensively on their brutal crackdown.

Her reporting on the legal and societal aftermath of the Islamic State helped shape her interest in security, governance, transitional justice and human rights.

Before joining Reuters in 2017, she was a news editor and reporter at The Guardian in New York, where she worked on both the US and international news desks. There, she focused on US foreign policy, the 2016 US presidential election, and rising extremism around the world.

Raya holds a masters degree from Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism and an undergraduate degree in history from the University of Pennsylvania. She is frequently invited to share her analysis and field reporting at think tanks briefings and conferences, including at Chatham House and The Century Foundation. She speaks Arabic, French and Spanish fluently and is conversant in German.