Lse Middle East Centre Podcasts

Speaker: Jim Muir, BBC News and LSE Middle East Centre Visiting Senior Fellow Chair: Ian Black, LSE Middle East Centre Visiting Senior Fellow Jim Muir has lived in and reported on the Middle East since he arrived in Beirut in January 1975, armed with a Cambridge degree in Arabic. Expecting Lebanon to be a stable base from which to cover a turbulent region, he spent the next 15 years reporting on the tortuous conflict which engulfed the country itself. He was in northern Iraq during the Kurdish uprising against Saddam Hussein in 1991 and covered the dramatic flight of the Kurds to the mountains. After a spell reporting the Bosnia conflict, he moved to Cairo as BBC Middle East correspondent in 1995, followed by five years in Tehran, where he chronicled the doomed hopes raised by the election of the reformist President Khatami. In 2004, he returned to Beirut, covered the 2006 Israel–Hezbollah war, and spent much time in Iraq until the Arab Spring diverted attention to Egypt, Tunisia and especially Syria, on who