Yalda Hakim joined BBC World News in December 2012 as a presenter and correspondent. Her on-screen debut came in March 2013 when she presented a special three part series of Our World entitled, Iraq: Ten Years On.
Before joining BBC World News Yalda was the presenter of SBS Dateline in Australia. From a headline-grabbing investigation in Afghanistan's Kandahar province to her reporting from Libya during the Arab Spring, Yalda has built up a wealth of experience in international journalism.
While reporting for SBS's Dateline show, Yalda delivered stories from the Middle East, the United States, Africa and Europe. In March 2012, she was the first western journalist to visit one of the villages in Afghanistan's Kandahar province, where US soldier Staff Sgt Robert Bales is alleged to have shot and killed Afghan civilians. Her report "Anatomy of a Massacre" helped shed new light on the events of that night. It made headlines around the world, particularly in the US, and had extensive news network coverage.
Other career highlights for Yalda include interviewing the President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, and travelling with him to Pakistan for talks with President Asif Ali Zardari and Iran's leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. She was in Libya when the people fought for freedom from Gaddafi's rule, and she reported on the resulting refugee crisis in Tunisia as thousands fled the conflict.
She presented the programme Dateline for the BBC from a range of locations including from Ground Zero in New York as the world marked ten years since 9/11; from the streets of Juba, South Sudan, as thousands celebrated the new country's independence, and from Afghanistan ten years on from the US-led invasion, where she interviewed a failed suicide bomber in one of the country's most notorious prisons.
Yalda Hakim was born in Afghanistan and moved to Australia in the late 1980s after her father fled Kabul with his family after the Russia invasion. She began her career as a junior journalist at SBS's World News Australia. She filmed her first story for Dateline in 2008 called "Yalda's Kabul", when she returned to Afghanistan. She was a finalist for the Australian Young Journalist of the Year Award and won the United Nations Media Peace Prize for Best Australian Television News coverage in 2009.
As well as English, Hakim speaks five other languages including Farsi, Urdu, Hindi, Pashto and Dari, and is currently learning Mandarin.