Ali Hashem is a columnist for Al-Monitor a reporter who covers the Middle East in general with special emphasis on Iranian affairs. He currently serves as a senior journalist at Al Jazeera English and prior to that he was BBC’s Iran affairs correspondent. With BBC he was the first journalist to tweet about the assassination of Qassem Soleimani on January, 3rd 2020. Ali is among the first staff that launched Al Mayadeen news channel in 2012 and BBC’s Arabic Television in 2008. With Al Mayadeen, he served as the channel’s Iran bureau chief, covering the nuclear talks during the presidency of Hasan Rouhani, the nuclear deal in Vienna where he was the only Arab journalist to interview Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif during the talks and after the announcement on July 14, 2015. During the second decade of the 21st century, he covered the fall of Mosul and the emergence of ISIS in Iraq and produced an hour-long documentary on the group’s leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. He wrote a detailed biography of Al-Baghdadi for Al-Monitor and the Sunday Times that were referenced in several books on the subject. Until March 2012, he was Al Jazeera's war correspondent, covering the revolution in Libya and Syria, draught and famine in Somalia, and Iran’s general election. Ali has written for several international Institutes and media outlets, such as Foreign Policy, The Guardian, the Sunday Times, the Middle East Institute, the Century Foundation, Carnegie Foundation, among others. In the Arab world Ali wrote for Lebanese daily As Safir, the Egyptian dailies Al-Masry Al-Youm and Al-Dustour and the Jordanian daily Al Ghad.