Alex Crawford

Alex Crawford has spent well over a decade on the frontlines of journalism, her drive and determination to get to a story have become a benchmark for others to follow and this year was no exception. The conflict in Ukraine was of course centre stage and Alex and her team once again pushed their reporting to bring ground-breaking frontline eyewitness reports from every corner of this deadly conflict.

In between all the frontline eyewitness reporting Alex and her team also spent weeks investigating a single war crime, the mass kidnapping of the villagers of Yahidne. To tell the story Alex obtained exclusive access to the Ukrainian prosecutor bringing war crimes charges against the Russian occupiers of Yahidne, she worked alongside Ukrainian forensic teams and of course spent days talking to survivors inside the village to piece together one of the most complete accounts of the horror that befell this tiny community when the Russians invaded. In the early months of 2023 Alex and her team were leading the way on the coverage of the tragic earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. They were the first western journalists to gain access to the North-eastern rebel controlled Syrian province of Idlib. There they witnessed a desperate race against time, as the white helmets scrambled to save those still under the rubble. They recounted the pain of families ripped apart in an instant, of mass graves being hurriedly dug to bury the ever-growing number of dead and the non-existent aid so desperately needed and awaited. While the world was rightly mobilising to help Turkey, the team’s reporting shone a light on just how completely Syrian victims of this tragedy were being forgotten. Using their vast experience in the region and at great personal risk, they were able to show the hidden tragedy of Syria’s Earthquake victims. Later in the year Alex and her team were also the first foreign journalists to be let back into Yemen in almost two years. There they witnessed and highlighted the horrors inflicted on civilians trapped inside a brutal civil war, one that has lasted more than 8-years and has morphed into a proxy conflict between regional powers.