| Zeinab Mohammed Salih | |
| Native Name: | زينب محمد صالح |
| Birth Place: | Khartoum, Sudan |
| Nationality: | Sudanese |
| Alma Mater: | City, University of London, Cardiff University |
| Occupation: | freelance journalist |
Zeinab Mohammed Salih (Arabic: زينب محمد صالح, born in Khartoum, Sudan) is a Sudanese freelance journalist, working mainly on political, social and gender-related issues in Sudan and neighbouring countries. She has published numerous reports for national Sudanese as well as for international news media, such as The Guardian, The Independent, BBC News, Financial Times and Al Jazeera.
Salih earned an MA degree in international politics from City University of London and in international journalism from Cardiff University in the United Kingdom.[1] Ahead of the Sudanese presidential 2010 elections and the 2011 referendum on southern Sudanese self-determination, Salih joined The Niles project in 2009, a German government funded transnational newspaper, published in Arabic and English. She was one of a group of young freelance journalists from northern and southern Sudan who acquired professional training to report about current and cultural affairs.[2] [3] In 2017, she also worked as journalist at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City.
Among Salih's more than 100 articles published by The Guardian up to March 2022,[4] there are several reports about the Sudanese Revolution. In particular, she has written about pro-democracy activists, atrocities committed by the Sudanese military or security forces, the role of women in the Sudanese revolution,[5] rape and lack of justice after the killing of a teenage girl.[6] In a 2019 article for the BBC News published before the revolution, she reported about Sudanese women using a Facebook group to share photographs of as yet unidentified sexual perpetrators, where the members of the group then tried to identify and denounce the perpetrators publicly.[7] Among other issues, Salih has written on Al-Jazeera News about ongoing human rights violations in Sudan's Darfur region,[8] and for BBC News about racial abuse and glorification of past slave traders in Sudan.[9]
Salih founded the Sudanese Network for Human Rights Information and has also reported on political and human rights issues in neighbouring Egypt, Chad and Ethiopia. During the 2023 Sudan conflict, The Observer published her memoir about challenges of reporting about Sudan under the military regime of Omar al-Bashir and the following transition towards democracy in Sudan. She explained, why she and her family did not want to leave the country despite the ongoing battles in the metropolitan area and why she continued reporting from the ground, even in life-threatening situations.[10]
In the 2019 book Pioneers, Rebels and a few Villains. 150 years of journalism in Eastern Africa, Salih was described as a "tireless freelance reporter about and beyond the Sudanese Revolution."[11]