PERSON: Nick Paton Walsh

CNN International

Senior International Correspondent

Nick Paton Walsh is an Emmy award-winning senior international correspondent for CNN International, based in Beirut. Paton Walsh focuses on covering stories from the Middle East, Afghanistan and the surrounding region.<br> <br> His work in Syria won two Edward Murrow awards in 2013, and contributed to a Peabody win for CNN’s Syria coverage. His script-writing in Syria and Afghanistan also won an Emmy that year for Outstanding Writing.<br> <br> Since joining CNN in 2011, he has reported from Afghanistan at length on the close of NATO’s campaign there. He has covered the Syrian war from inside the country, and at its borders, also cataloguing the rise of al-Qaeda backed militants in the north. He also reported from the UN in New York on the diplomatic tussle to punish the use of chemical weapons in Syria.<br> <br> Paton Walsh also reported from Dagestan in the aftermath of the 2013 Boston bombings, interviewing the family of the Tsarnaev brothers and establishing some of the first links to militants there. That year, he covered the intense protests in central Istanbul as tear gas repeatedly swamped his live position, and saw the aftermath of the Tacloban typhoon in the Phillippines.<br> <br> Nick first reported for CNN from Pakistan in March 2011. He was subsequently the network's first correspondent reporting live from Abbotabad covering the death of Osama Bin Laden, where he obtained exclusive video from inside the al-Qaeda leader’s compound and broke the story that a courier's cellphone signal had led American troops there.<br> <br> Previously he spent several years working in Asia for the UK’s Channel Four News, focusing on Afghanistan where he gained rare access to a tiny and isolated American outpost near the Pakistani border - COP Keating - which was overrun by insurgents, and covered the 2009 presidential election crisis.<br> <br> While Asia and foreign affairs correspondent at Channel Four News he secured a rare and exclusive interview with the Russian alleged arms dealer Viktor Bout, while his teams' reports on alleged human rights abuses in Sri Lanka at the end of the civil war led to their forced deportation from the country.<br> <br> Walsh was also the program's undercover correspondent in Zimbabwe for the violent 2008 elections, reported on the July 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, the Mumbai hotel sieges in India, Naxalite rebels in Chhattisgarh, India and the protests that shook Bangkok in May 2010.<br> <br> From 2002 to 2006, he was the Moscow Correspondent for the Guardian newspaper during the rise of Vladimir Putin. He reported on both the Dubrovka theatre siege and the Beslan school hostage crisis, alongside the revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan and developments from the troubled North Caucasus.<br> <br> Walsh won the British Press Awards' Young Journalist of the Year in 2000. He won Amnesty International's Gaby Rado Award for a reporter at the start of their career in 2006 for his work in the former Soviet Union, and their television award for his work in Sri Lanka in 2010. <br> <br> -- cnn.com