Lyse Doucet

Lyse Doucet left the east coast of Canada in the early 1980′s and has reported for the BBC ever since. She initially spent four years in West Africa covering military coups, the recurrent drought in the Sahel, and African efforts to achieve development and their own answers to democracy.

In 1988-89, at the beginning of the end of the Cold War, she covered the last march of the Soviet Red Army out of Afghanistan, and stayed to cover, from both sides, the protracted conflict between the government in Kabul and mujahadeen fighters based in Pakistan and Iran.

From the end of 1989 to the last day of 1992, she was based in Islamabad, travelling across Pakistan, and into Afghanistan, and Iran. In 1993, she returned to London as a reporter for World Service Television, but made regular trips to Iran as part of the BBC’s efforts to open an office in Teheran.

By the middle of 1994, she was off to Jordan to open an office there, spent a great deal of time in the desert following the Jordanian-Israeli negotiations which ended in a peace treaty and then moved to Jerusalem where she is now based, still reporting on efforts to clinch an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, and trying to find time to explore the many other facets of the two societies.

In 1994 she opened the BBC office in Amman, Jordan. From 1995 to 1999 she was based in Jerusalem, travelling across the Middle East. In 1999, she joined the BBC’s team of presenters but continues to report from the field. Lyse Doucet is often deployed to anchor significant news events from the field, and to interview key players.

She played a leading role in the BBC’s coverage of the “Arab spring”, reporting from Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. She has covered all major wars in the Middle East since the mid 1990s. Doucet has been a frequent visitor to Pakistan and Afghanistan since the late 1980s. Her work also focuses on the aftermath of major natural disasters, including the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 which took her to India and Indonesia.

Lyse has an honours bachelor degree in Political Studies from Queen’s University at Kingston and a masters degree in international relations from the University of Toronto.

Biography courtesy of the BBC.