Richard Engel

American journalist and author
other people with similar names

Richard Engel (born September 16, 1973) is an American journalist and author who is the chief foreign correspondent for NBC News. He was assigned to that position on April 18, 2008, after serving as the network's Middle East correspondent and Beirut bureau chief. Before joining NBC in May 2003, Engel reported on the start of the 2003 war in Iraq for ABC News as a freelance journalist in Baghdad. Engel is known for having covered the Iraq War, the Arab Spring and the Syrian Civil War. He speaks and reads Arabic fluently and is fluent in Italian and Spanish. Engel received the Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism for his report "War Zone Diary". Engel wrote A Fist in the Hornet's Nest, published in 2004, about his experience covering the Iraq War from Baghdad. His most recent book, And Then All Hell Broke Loose, published in 2016, is about his two decade career in the Middle East as a freelance reporter.

Engel grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York City. His father Peter, a former Goldman Sachs financier, and mother Nina, who ran an antiques store, feared for their son's future prospects because of his dyslexia. His father is Jewish, and his mother is Swedish. Engel attended the Riverdale Country School, a highly competitive college prep school in New York City, where at first he struggled with his schoolwork and progress. At age 13, he joined a wilderness survival camp where he learned about leadership and how to be more independent. His schoolwork began to improve and he started to gain popularity with his peers. He then spent his junior year of high school in Italy and became fluent in Italian. Engel began to appreciate the difference in cultures and countries that influenced his future career choices. He later went to Stanford University, where he occasionally wrote for The Stanford Daily. Engel spent one summer as an unpaid intern at CNN Business News in New York City. He graduated from Stanford in 1996 with a B. A. in international relations. Engel worked for ABC News as a freelance journalist during the initial invasion of Iraq by U. S. forces. Engel continued his coverage of the Iraq war in Baghdad as NBC's primary Iraq correspondent. He filed a number of reports from Lebanon during the 2006 Lebanon War. In April 2008, Engel became Chief Foreign Correspondent of NBC News. In 2009, Engel was stationed in Kabul, Afghanistan, covering the country's August presidential election. In 2011, Engel reported, at times through tear gas, on the Egyptian revolution. He also covered the Libyan Civil War, where he was nearly shot in Benghazi. The same year he toured and reported on the city of Mogadishu, Somalia, for a segment titled "The World's Most Dangerous City", for which he would receive a News and Documentary Emmy Award nomination. Engel reported on the Israel Gaza conflict of 2012, the continued violence stemming from the revolution in Syria and its consequent civil war, and the political transition of Egypt following the election of President Mohamed Morsi in June 2012. Engel is the host of the MSNBC special series On Assignment with Richard Engel, which won a 2019 Peabody Award. Engel's latest documentary, Ukraine: Freedom or Death aired on April 22, 2022, and covered the first two months of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Engel frequently traveled to Afghanistan to report on the situation between U. S. forces, the Afghani people, and the Taliban. He often traveled to the Korengal Valley, otherwise known as the "valley of death", one of the most dangerous outposts in Afghanistan. His coverage focused on the challenges of free elections in Afghanistan and the disruptions to democracy in the country.

Engel reported extensively on the Arab Spring movement. He followed the uprisings in Egypt, Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Bahrain, and Yemen. In 2012, he was awarded the Alfred I. du Pont Columbia Award for his outstanding breaking news coverage of the uprisings. In Egypt, Engel often reported from Tahrir Square, interviewing protestors in Tahrir Square as President Hosni Mubarak surrendered power to the Egyptian military. His reporting helped expose the role Egyptian labor strikes and worker protests played in the coup against Mubarak. Engel reported on the revolution in Libya from the front lines, spending months traveling from rebel commanded areas in Benghazi to other rebel strongholds. In March 2011, Engel was caught in an artillery strike while interviewing fighters during a rebel advancement towards former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's forces outside the city of Ajdabiya. Engel traveled into Syria repeatedly with rebel militias and the Free Syrian Army. He reported on the advances made by rebel fighters within the country as well as the mass defections from Syrian President Bashar al Assad's government army.

On December 13, 2012, Engel and his five crew members, Aziz Akyavaş, Ghazi Balkiz, John Kooistra, Ian Rivers, and Ammar Cheikh Omar, were abducted in Syria. Having escaped after five days in captivity, Engel said he believed that a Shabiha group loyal to al Assad was behind the abduction, and that the crew was freed by the Ahrar al Sham group five days later. In April 2013, Engel recounted his experience in a Vanity Fair editorial, titled "The Hostage". Engel's account was however challenged from early on, with Jamie Dettmer of The Daily Beast citing unnamed sources, who believed Engel and his team had been kidnapped by rogue rebel groups opposed to Assad. In April 2015, NBC had to revise the kidnapping account, following further investigations by The New York Times, which had conducted several dozen interviews, suggesting that the NBC team "was almost certainly taken by a Sunni criminal element affiliated with the Free Syrian Army," rather than by a loyalist Shia group.

Engel was married to a fellow Stanford student; the couple divorced in 2005. In May 2015, Engel married producer Mary Forrest. They have two sons: Henry, born in September 2015, and Theodore, born in August 2019. Henry Engel was born with Rett syndrome, a genetic disorder that is extremely rare in males; he died in August 2022 at age 6.