The Birth of a Dream

Born in Iraq, Dalia recalls her childhood memories of traveling abroad with her parents. That’s when she was first exposed to American and Western journalism. “It was unlike anything I had experienced growing up with state-run media in Iraq,” Dalia explained. “I was exposed to multiple viewpoints and investigative journalism—something unimaginable to me at the time. And the same journalists reporting on controversies a day earlier were still on the air the next day! This blew my mind—that they weren’t arrested or didn’t vanish as they would have if they were in Iraq. That level of freedom provided a spark inside me. That was when my dream of becoming a journalist first took root.”

In Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, however, the only path the school for journalism provided was to become a mouthpiece of the Ba’ath Party, an ideology based on the principles of Arab socialism, secular Arab nationalism, and Pan-Arabism, that promoted the one-party state and rejected political pluralism. Instead, she followed her parents’ footsteps, studied theater, and received her Bachelor’s degree from the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad in 1988, just as the eight-year Iran-Iraq War was winding down. That same year, Dalia and her family left most of their possessions behind and fled the country as Saddam Hussein’s focus and fury switched from across his eastern border to the harsher forms of tyranny he brought down upon his own people.

Dalia settled for a time in the UAE where she launched her career in journalism by working for Sharjah TV. After Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Dalia moved to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia to take part in establishing the radio station, Voice of the Iraqi Opposition.

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America’s Outstretched Hand

Dalia first came to the U.S. on a tourist visa after the First Gulf War in 1991 to visit family and she quickly fell in love with America, its culture and its freedoms. “That you could say anything you wanted in America without fear of the secret police or that your success would be determined based on your individual skills was something completely new to me. I wanted to be here and become a part of the American fabric,” Dalia recalled. “I would be free to pursue my dreams as a woman, a secular Muslim, but most importantly, as an American.”

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A journalist and activist

In the U.S. it didn’t take long for Dalia to surpass the dreams she held as a child. She continued her career as a journalist and five years later, Dalia became an anchor and writer for Voice of America—fulfilling the dream she had as a child when her grandmother would tune in to the station in secret over AM radio while living in Iraq.

While serving as a political correspondent in Washington, DC for the Middle East powerhouse news network, Al-Arabiya, the U.S. invaded and toppled the Hussein regime in Iraq in 2003. She jumped at the opportunity to become an anchor for Al-Hurra TV, the U.S. government-owned Arabic language satellite TV channel that broadcasts news to audiences in the Middle East and North Africa. She worked from Washington from December 2003 until April 2005, including stints as a White House correspondent, and she continued her work for the U.S. network in Baghdad until March 2007.

Hoping to further assist the U.S. in its efforts to turn full control of the country back to Iraqis, she began working with the U.S. Department of Defense-run Multi-National Security Transition Command – Iraq, in Baghdad as a Media Advisor in their Public Affairs Office. There she helped develop a new Iraqi news center and train Iraqi security ministries on how to develop and sustain professional media offices, modeled after the freedoms she came to enjoy in America. Dalia returned once again to her journalist roots at the end of 2007, reporting from Iraq, Lebanon, the United Kingdom, and eventually back in the U.S.

With over three decades of reporting from the capital cities of the Middle East to the U.S. Dalia has written, produced, and hosted live shows on TV and radio in both English and Arabic. Over the course of her career, she has interviewed a variety of world leaders, such as former President Jimmy Carter, First Lady Barbara Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and many more government leaders in the Middle East.