Yalda Hakim Biography
Yalda Hakim is a broadcast journalist, news presenter, and documentary filmmaker from Australia. Hakim primarily hosts BBC World News, but her documentaries and reports can also be seen on BBC News Channel and BBC Two’s Newsnight.
How old is Yalda Hakim? – Age
She is 38 years old as of 25 June 2021. She was born in 1983 in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Yalda Hakim Family
Her family fled the country when she was six months old, during the Soviet-Afghan War. With the assistance of people smugglers, the family traveled overland on horseback to Pakistan. After two years in Pakistan, her family immigrated to Australia in 1986, when she was three years old.
Yalda Hakim Husband
Yalda is married to Abed Rashid. Her husband Abed, worked in the Royal Australian Air Force. He is also an avionics engineer.
Yalda Hakim Education
Hakim went to Macarthur Girls High School in Sydney, where she played the violin and was a sports captain and prefect. She went to Parramatta West Public School as well. Hakim went on to study for a Bachelor of Arts in Media at Macquarie University from 2002 to 2004, where she was also a board member of the Macquarie University Union. Hakim earned a Diploma in Journalism from Macleay College in Sydney in 2005. From 2007 to 2009, she pursued a Bachelor of Arts via distance education at Monash University, in addition to a cadetship at the Special Broadcasting Service.
Yalda Hakim Net Worth
She has an estimated net worth of $1 million.
Yalda Hakim Career
In March 2013, she made her on-screen debut, presenting Iraq: Ten Years On, a special three-part series on Our World. Yalda was the host of SBS Dateline in Australia before joining BBC World News. Yalda has a wealth of journalistic experience around the world, from a headline-making investigation in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province to her reporting from Libya during the Arab Spring.
For the last four years, Hakim has been reporting for SBS’s Dateline show from the Middle East, the United States, Africa, and Europe. Hakim was the first western journalist to visit one of the villages in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province where US soldier Staff Sgt Robert Bales is accused of shooting and killing Afghan civilians in March 2012. The report “Anatomy of a Massacre” by Hakim traced the steps of the rogue soldier, shedding new light on the events of that night. It made headlines all over the world, particularly in the United States, and was widely covered by the major news networks.
Other career highlights include interviewing Afghanistan’s President, Hamid Karzai, and accompanying him to Pakistan for talks with President Asif Ali Zardari and Iran’s leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, about regional peace. She was also on the ground in Libya as people fought for independence from Gaddafi’s rule, and she reported on the resulting refugee crisis in Tunisia as thousands fled the conflict.
She hosted Dateline from a variety of locations, including Ground Zero in New York ten years after the 9/11 terror attacks, the streets of Juba, South Sudan, where thousands celebrated the new country’s independence, and Afghanistan ten years into the US-led invasion, where she interviewed a failed suicide bomber in one of the country’s most notorious prisons. Her career began as a cadet journalist at SBS’s World News Australia. In 2008, she returned to Afghanistan to film her first Dateline story, “Yalda’s Kabul.” Hakim was also a finalist for the Australian Young Journalist of the Year Award in 2009, and she received the United Nations Media Peace Prize for Best Australian Television News Coverage.