France honours Samia Nakhoul with top award

Reuters Middle East editor Samia Nakhoul has been awarded one of France’s highest honours, the National Order of Merit, for her services to journalism.

Nakhoul, who joined Reuters in Beirut in 1987 during the civil war in her native Lebanon, has covered every major story in the Middle East in the past three decades and is widely regarded as one of the foremost authorities on the region.

In naming her a knight of the order at a ceremony at his residence in Beirut, French ambassador Patrice Paoli called Nakhoul a journalist of exemplary courage whose work had made the realities, suffering and strengths of the Middle East more intelligible to readers.

Nakhoul was seriously wounded in April 2003 during the American invasion of Iraq when a shell fired from a US tank hit a Baghdad hotel that had become a base for the news media, killing Reuters TV cameraman Taras Protysuk and Spanish cameraman Jose Couso.

Nakhoul said she had hoped the Iraq War would be her last conflict but the Middle East had instead been convulsed by extensive bloodshed and upheaval. More than 100 journalists had been killed in the region since 2011, she noted, and the group calling itself Islamic State had made journalists a target of choice. 

Nakhoul dedicated her award to journalists and media workers killed doing their jobs. The ceremony on 12 November was attended by Nakhoul’s family, friends and colleagues, including members of the Reuters bureau in Beirut.

PHOTO: Samia Nakhoul with France’s ambassador to Lebanon Patrice Paoli ■