Umar Farooq is a fellow with the Future Security Program and an investigative journalist and foreign correspondent who has reported from across the Middle East and South and Central Asia.
He has worked as a correspondent for Reuters based in Pakistan, and for the Los Angeles Times and Al Jazeera English while based in Turkey. Later, Farooq was a national reporting fellow for ProPublica based in the US, where he investigated police shootings, indigenous water rights, and loopholes in US weapons export rules. His work was recognized for awards, including by the Medill School of Journalism for Public Interest Magazine Journalism, and by the Indigenous Journalists Association for Best Feature Story. Farooq’s reporting has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Christian Science Monitor, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, National Geographic, the Guardian, the Atlantic, the Nation, the Daily Beast, and other outlets. He has been a recipient of grants from the National Geographic Society and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Farooq launched and helps to run the global investigative journalism podcast On Spec.