Iona Craig

freelance journalist

Iona Craig is a British-Irish freelance investigative journalist. Since 2010 her work has focused on Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula. Iona was based in Sana'a from 2010 through 2014 as The Times (of London) Yemen correspondent, covering Yemen’s revolution, America’s growing covert war in the country and the civil war that began in 2014.

Iona's work has won numerous awards, including the 2016 Orwell Prize for journalism, the United Kingdom’s most prestigious honour for political writing, and the 2014 Martha Gellhorn Prize, Britain’s leading investigative journalism award. Her investigation for The Intercept of a Navy SEAL raid in a remote Yemeni village won the 2018 George Polk Award for foreign reporting, the most esteemed U.S. mark of distinction in international journalism after the Pulitzer Prize. Iona has contributed to over 20 publications worldwide, shot footage for CNN and Channel 4 News as well as regularly provided analysis on multiple broadcast channels around the globe including the BBC, Democracy Now!, CNN and Sky News. She has also reported from Washington DC, Turkey, Lebanon, Djibouti, Jerusalem and the Occupied Territories.

Beyond her journalistic work, Iona heads up the Yemen Data Project, which collates open-source data on coalition airstrikes and political violence. She is a Centre for Investigative Journalism board member, and an adivser to Declassifed UK. In the first year of the Saudi-led air campaign in Yemen, she carried out research on air dropped bombs for Action On Armed Violence (AOAV) and later worked as a consultant for the International Crisis Group. Most recently, she spent a year working as a co-curator for the Imperial War Museums exhibition on Yemen’s humanitarian crisis that ran in Manchester from May 2019 to the end of January 2020.

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