Abbie Cheeseman is a foreign correspondent, currently covering the Middle East for the Washington Post, with a focus on narrative-driven accountability, national security and human rights stories. She has been based in Beirut for the past seven years.

The recipient of the 2024 Stern-Bryan fellowship at the Post, she spent three months travelling across the United States covering the presidential election that brought Donald Trump back to office, before moving back to Lebanon for the paper.

Over the past seven years she has covered all of the major twists and turns of the Middle East’s regional politics and conflicts, but has most closely followed Lebanon’s cascading crises and Israel’s wars on Gaza and Lebanon.

Her background is in investigative journalism, particularly surrounding Western covert military actions and air campaigns in the Middle East and Afghanistan. In 2022 she was part of the New York Times team that won the Pulitzer Prize for International Journalism for The Civilian Casualty Files, led by Azmat Khan.

She started her career at Airwars and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism while completing her Masters degree in Interactive Journalism at City, University of London.

Her Middle East analysis is regularly seen and heard across live TV and radio in the UK and U.S.