Azmat Khan

Azmat Khan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter whose work grapples with the human costs of war.

She is an investigative reporter with the New York Times Magazine and is the Patti Cadby Birch Assistant Professor at Columbia Journalism School, where she also directs the Simon and June Li Center for Global Journalism.

Khan's investigations from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan have prompted widespread policy impact and won more than a dozen awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, two National Magazine Awards, two Overseas Press Club awards, the Polk Award, and the Hillman Prize. 

Khan’s multi-part series in the New York Times, The Civilian Casualty Files, was awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting. Based on more than five years of reporting by Khan, the series laid bare how America’s campaign of so-called ‘precision strikes’ has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children. Khan sued the Department of Defense to obtain and analyze a trove of more than 1,300 formerly secret military casualty assessments. She also visited the sites of more than 100 civilian casualty incidents in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan — often tracking down individuals from the records — and conducting scores of interviews with airstrike survivors, their families, military officials, and intelligence informants.