Oklahoma Voices:
OK Native Hannah Allam’s Experiences in Iraq (Jun 10, 2007)
In 2003 at the age of 25, Oklahoma native Hannah Allam became the youngest bureau chief in the American newspaper industry when McClatchy (Knight Ridder) Newspapers hired her to head its Baghdad bureau. She spent the next two years reporting on the war in Iraq and winning some of the top awards in print journalism before moving on to become McClatchy’s Cairo Bureau Chief, where she now oversees coverage of the entire Middle East and Islamic world. Just after she finished her Iraq assignment in late 2005, Allam paid a visit to her alma mater, the University of Oklahoma, to speak with reporters at The Oklahoma Daily, where she was once editor. Today we air an edited version of that speech.

In her comments, Allam speaks about her former Iraqi translator Ban Adil Sarhan, who sought refuge in Oklahoma after her family was killed because of her work with the Americans. Listen to KGOU's interview with Sarhan that we aired just after the December, 2005 parliamentary elections in Iraq.

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