Rana Sabbagh

Sabbagh is the winner of the 2024 ICFJ Knight Trailblazer Award.

Rana Sabbagh has spent more than four decades building a vibrant investigative reporting culture in the Middle East and North Africa – one of the most dangerous regions of the world for journalists to expose official wrongdoing.

As the co-founder of Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), Sabbagh has trained a generation of investigative reporters and editors, overseen the production of hundreds of stories on issues from corruption to human rights abuses, and fought for freedom of expression in the region at great risk to herself. She continues to produce hard-hitting stories as senior editor for the MENA region for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

Sabbagh began her journalistic career as a reporter at the English-language Jordan Times in 1985. She left that newspaper to become Amman deputy bureau chief for Reuters News Agency, then Gulf correspondent and sub-editor for Reuters in Dubai. In 1997, she returned to the Jordan Times and two years later she was appointed its top editor – becoming the first woman to become chief editor of a political daily newspaper in the Arab Levant region.

Sabbagh modernized the Jordan Times, quadrupling its staff and moving it from a pro-government mouthpiece to an independent source of reporting and commentary. Under her leadership, the paper’s editorials encouraged controversial reforms in such areas as violence against women, rule of law, accountability, good governance and equality for all citizens. But she was fired as editor after she sent reporters to cover rioting in the south of Jordan and then wrote an editorial calling for investigations into allegations of torture in police detention centers. Sabbagh also co-founded Jordan’s Alghad newspaper, and in 2003 was again removed after writing columns calling for reform and exposing corruption.

In 2005, she founded ARIJ, the region’s first network of investigative journalists. Under her leadership, the organization grew from a small training center promoting a type of journalism nearly unheard of in the Arab world to a powerhouse working in 16 countries, with an international reputation for rigorous investigations. 

ARIJ has trained more than 4,000 journalists, professors and students, and produced over 600 investigations, many of which have won regional and international awards during her tenure as chief executive from 2005 to 2019. Journalists she mentored – especially women – have gone on to work for global news outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. One of her mentees, a Gaza-based reporter, Mohammad Abu Shahma, recently won a prestigious media prize for exposing war profiteers during the current conflict. Two investigative units that ARIJ set up in 2011, at Watan media network in Ramallah and Al Jadeed TV in Beirut, are still operating, producing hard-hitting investigations and earning prizes. Riad Kobaissi, who leads the unit at Al Jadeed, won the ICFJ Knight International Journalism Award for his recent top-level probes into corruption and miscarriage of justice, some of which he completed with OCCRP support. 

Sabbagh has been aggressively targeted for her work by the people she and her mentees have investigated. In 2021 and 2022 her phones were found to be infected by Pegasus malware. During that period, OCCRP investigated two global leaks which had many high-profile subjects, including senior Jordanian officials. She has frequently been summoned to answer for her work and invited to choose her allegiance between her job and her country, but she has never been intimidated by government pressure. She cannot travel to at least four Arab states whose leadership she has investigated.

At OCCRP, Sabbagh has continued to produce investigative pieces and to mentor journalists from MENA and beyond. She collaborated with BBC Arabic to produce the documentary “Syria: Addicted to Captagon.” The film showed how President Bashar al-Assad’s family and high military officials have profited from the production and smuggling of Captagon, a highly addictive amphetamine used by young people in the MENA region and beyond. A former U.S. envoy to Syria said the profits from the trade dwarf the entire Syrian budget. The film has been viewed 1.6 million times on YouTube, the highest engagement of a BBC Arabic investigation in two years, according to BBC editor Christopher Mitchell. 

This and other stories led by Sabbagh have had substantial impact. In 2023 and 2024, the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union announced sanctions against people cited in the Captagon investigation or other OCCRP investigations overseen by Sabbagh.

In her 40-year career, Sabbagh has courageously succeeded as an investigative reporter, editor, trainer and mentor in a region where questioning governments can be highly dangerous and where patriarchal attitudes conspire to keep women in subservient roles.

Photo Credit: Alaa Al Sukhni