Adel Darwish

Political Editor of Middle East Magazine Group, a veteran British reporter, who, as a foreign correspondent for several Fleet Street newspapers, covered many events that changed history in the Middle East and Africa over the past four decades.

He was one of three British reporters who in 1972 were the first western journalists to lunch with, the still little known in the west, Saddam Hussein. As deputy leader of the Baath party, the late Hussein, charmed ‘her Majesty’s press corps’ with his jokes about the Mafia and by downing most of two bottles of Johnnie walker black label whisky during an afternoon chat.

Darwish covered the Middle East region since 1969 Colonel Muammer Gaddafi’s coup, and the Dawson's Field aircraft hijackings in Jordan by Palestinian militants leading to Black September in 1970 and the subsequent Colonel Nasser’s death and funeral. He reported from the ground on the 1973 Yum Kippur War, on the Lebanon civil war, on President Anwar Sadat’s historic visit to Israel leading to Egyptian Israeli peace treaty and Sadat’s assassination. Darwish eported on Iraqi Ba’athist campaign against the Kurds in 1970s and covered the 1979 Iranian revolution and the subsequent Iraq Iran war alternating between the two sides. In addition he covered both First Gulf War (Kuwait Liberation) and the second one that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003. For decades Darwish roamed the area between the Atlas Mountains and the Khyber Pass, witnessed and covered uprisings, coups, conferences, assassinations and hijackings among other events. He met most Middle East leaders, politicians and the occasional terrorist.