Patrick Martin

As a veteran Middle East correspondent and former foreign editor, Patrick Martin has his finger on the pulse of one of the most volatile regions in the world. His extensive travels and assignments in the Middle East began in 1971 as a 20-year-old, when he motorcycled across North Africa and include four years as The Globe and Mail’s Middle East bureau chief in the mid-90’s. Most recently, in 2004, he returned to Iraq to cover its handover to civilian authorities and its prospects for a peaceful future. Patrick was in Israel a few days after Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982; he has covered several Israeli elections beginning in 1988; was on hand when Yasser Arafat returned to the Gaza Strip in 1994 (Patrick postponed his own wedding to be in Gaza on that occasion), and has spent several days living both in an occupied Palestinian town and in an Israeli West Bank settlement to see, firsthand, the passions that fuel the region’s tensions. Across the region, Patrick has witnessed the resurgence of Islam as a political force and has written extensively of its role in emerging democracies. He interviewed Muslim leaders in Israel as they first ran for elected office, and in Saudi Arabia as they plotted against the government. He went in disguise, dodging insurgents, to the holy city of Najaf in Iraq to interview controversial Shia Muslim leaders; he jumped off a train in upper Egypt to evade authorities in order to interview radical Muslim leaders two days before the army stormed their mosque and killed them, and moved from roof-top to roof-top in Algiers to witness outlawed Muslim clerics after the army shut down the country’s parliamentary elections in 1992.