Leila Molana-Allen is a an award-winning roving Special Correspondent for the PBS Newshour, reporting from across the wider Middle East and Africa. She has been based in the region, in Beirut and Baghdad, for a decade. She was honoured with the Shifa Gardi Award for Conflict Journalist of the Year in 2025 and is the recipient of the 2024 Kathy Gannon Legacy Award for her reporting.

In late 2024 Molana-Allen crossed into Syria as the Assad regime collapsed, reporting from cities and villages across the country in the days following the fall of Damascus. Earlier that year Molana-Allen reported from the front lines of Israel’s war on Lebanon, covering the devastating impact of air strikes and the ground campaign on civilians. Her reporting was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Breaking News Coverage. In Summer 2024 she gained extremely rare access for her team to travel across the front lines of the war in Sudan, reporting on the RSF’s foreign weaponry pipeline and human rights abuses and the impact of the war on Sudanese civilians and medical facilities, producing an Emmy-nominated series of films.

Molana-Allen spent months reporting from the front lines of the Israel-Gaza war, uncovering the aftermath of the October 7 terror attacks and investigating human rights abuses in Jerusalem and the West Bank, a body of work which was honoured with a Peabody Award.

Earlier in 2023 she investigated the growth of Palestinian militant groups inside Jenin and Nablus after the IDF assault on Jenin camp and reported from the ongoing anti-government protests across Israel. Molana-Allen gained rare access to enter North-West Syria’s besieged enclave to report on recovery efforts after the devastating earthquake and ongoing Russian and Syrian regime assaults on civilians in Idlib and Aleppo. She has produced ongoing reporting on growing radicalism and violence in ISIS camps and prisons in North-East Syria.

In 2021, Molana-Allen embedded with US forces in Iraq under daily assault from Iran-backed militias, and accompanied Iraqi forces as they hunted down ISIS sleeper cells, coming under fire from ISIS militants in hiding. Molana-Allen led the first TV crew to gain access to the site of the 2020 Beirut port explosion for the Newshour, after months reporting from the midst of anti-government protests and the ensuing violent crackdown.

Before joining the Newshour, Molana-Allen was a foreign correspondent for The Economist in London, a correspondent for BBC World Service Radio, and Middle East Correspondent for FRANCE 24. Raised in a first generation British-Iranian family in London, Molana-Allen gained her bachelor’s degree from University of Oxford and a Masters of Science from the Columbia School of Journalism in New York City.

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