Syed Nazakat, India

Syed Nazakat is a Special Correspondent at India's leading news magazine, The Week. Over the last ten years, he has worked in broadcast, print and online journalism and reported from 17 countries, including Nepal, Laos, Cambodia, Hong Kong and his own native Kashmir region. He has been in difficult areas covering controversial topics, including India's secret torture chambers and arms smuggling in Bangladesh. He specializes in war reporting, military and security affairs and issues related to terrorism and human rights. He was the first Indian journalist to report from an al Qaeda rehabilitation camp in Saudi Arabia.

Nazakat has received several prestigious journalism awards in both India and abroad, including the Christiane Amanpour Award for Religion Journalism in 2013. In 2010 he was a finalist for the Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting. He is now a fellow at the Konrad Adenauer Asian Center of Journalism at Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines.

His finalist entry tells the story of hundreds of Afghan women from all corners of that war-torn country who are trafficked over the border and sold into sex slavery. Many choose self-immolation to escape their fate. Nazakat had to spend months researching the topic and had great difficulty speaking to victims. But the hard work paid off, and his uncovering of this tragic, underreported story resulting in Indian government officials approaching him for details on the growing problem.

Link to entry: "Like cattle, from Kabul"