Wadah Khanfar

When Al Jazeera was established in 1996, Khanfar was a graduate student in International Politics and African Studies in South Africa, and a researcher and consultant in Middle Eastern economics and political affairs. He was asked by the channel to provide an analysis on African affairs, which led to him becoming a correspondent in South Africa until 2001.[8][12] At a conference in Pretoria on 27–29 August 2012, Khanfar said that he had learned about both political struggle and reconciliation during his years in South Africa.[13]

In 2001 and 2002, Khanfar reported on Afghanistan from New Delhi. Al Jazeera was unable to get its own correspondent back into the northern territories controlled by the Northern Alliance on the eve of the war, so New Delhi was used, India having a strong Northern Alliance diplomatic presence. As the Taliban regime was collapsing, Al Jazeera's presence in Kabul was threatened by problems including US fire,[14][15] and concerns from journalists and diplomats that the then bureau chief and correspondent, Tayseer Allouni had become compromised as a partisan of the Taliban cause. Khanfar was brought in to replace Allouni as Kabul bureau chief and restored working relations with the new authorities.[14]

During the Iraq war, Khanfar reported from Kurdish-controlled territory in the north,[16] and after the fall of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath regime, he became Al Jazeera bureau chief in Baghdad.[14][17]

At this time the channel was widely perceived as playing to popular pro-Baathist and anti-Coalition Arab sentiment, despite being represented at the Coalition's Central Headquarters and having an Al Jazeera correspondent embedded within coalition forces.[12][14] The then US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and then Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz publicly criticized Al Jazeera, Rumsfeld calling the channel's reporting "vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable...",[18] while Wolfowitz claimed the station was "inciting violence" and "endangering the lives of American troops" in Iraq.[19]

This public criticism came amid attacks on Al Jazeera from US forces, including the shelling of a hotel in Basra on 8 April 2003 used solely by the channel's correspondents.[20] Nearly a week later, US forces bombed the station's Baghdad offices wounding one cameraman and killing a correspondent, Tariq Ayoub[19][21] on the same day that two Reuters journalists were killed when a US tank shell struck their office in the Palestine Hotel. In July, Khanfar wrote an open letter to Paul Bremer, the US proconsul in Iraq responding to his assertion that television stations or newspapers guilty of "incitement to violence" would be shut down.[19] Khanfar wrote that his offices and staff had been subject to "strafing by gunfire, death threats, confiscation of news material, and multiple detentions and arrests, all carried out by US soldiers", asserting that the channel's coverage had been consistently harassed for unfavourable reporting during the Ba'athist regime.[19] He also said that because Al Jazeera at that time was only available in Arabic, reliance on the channel's coverage came "from second-, third- and fourth-hand sources – half-truths and total falsehoods that make the rounds in Washington, Baghdad and elsewhere."[22]

In September 2011, the non-profit whistleblowing website WikiLeaks released a cache of leaked diplomatic cables highlighting U.S. activities overseas. Several of the cables implicated Khanfar in unduly influencing Al Jazeera's news coverage of the War in Iraq at the behest of U.S. embassy officials in Qatar. In one instance, the cables suggested that Khanfar removed images of wounded Iraqi civilians from an Al Jazeera report following pressure by the U.S. embassy. They also suggested that Khanfar was anxious to keep his behind-the-scenes collaboration secret.[24]

In September 2011, Khanfar announced to his staff and publicly on the micro-blogging platform Twitter that he would be resigning. In an emotional farewell to Al Jazeera staff he cites that the decision had been in his mind for sometime and that the target of establishing Al Jazeera as a global media leader has been met. This is also the theme of an interview broadcast on Al Jazeera where he addresses and refutes suggestions that Wikileaks and pressure from USA may have influenced his resignation.[25] He is succeeded by Ahmed bin Jassim Al Thani.