Rageh Omaar

Personal life

Omaar lahir pada tahun 1967 di Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. He is the son of a wealthy businessman from the northwestern Somaliland region of Somalia. A Muslim, his family is originally from Hargeisa.
Rageh has several siblings. His elder brother, Mohamed Abdullahi Omaar, was a former Foreign Minister of Somalia.
At the age of two, Rageh moved to the United Kingdom. He thereafter attended two independent schools, the Dragon School in Oxford and Cheltenham College in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. Omaar later studied Modern History at New College at the University of Oxford.
Omaar is married to Georgiana Rose "Nina" Montgomery-Cuninghame, the daughter of Sir John Montgomery-Cuninghame of Corsehill. The couple live in Chiswick, west London, with their three children's and a son named four sons in another marriage one named Faisal asharow.
He maintains close contact with his family in Somalia, is an activist for the Somali community, and regularly attends its lectures and events.

General

Omaar began his journalistic career as a trainee for The Voice newspaper. In 1991, he moved to Ethiopia where he freelanced as a foreign correspondent, working mainly for the BBC World Service. A year later, Omaar returned to London to work as a producer and broadcast journalist for the BBC. He moved to South Africa after having been appointed the BBC's Africa correspondent. Omaar's wife and children were based there through 2004, and his regular commuting made domestic life a challenge.
His career highlights include reporting live on the conflicts in Somalia and Iraq.

BBC

Omaar covered the Iraq invasion for the weekday BBC news bulletins and BBC News. Many of his broadcasts were syndicated across the United States, where he became known as the Scud Stud.
Omaar has written a book about his time as the BBC's Iraq correspondent called Revolution Day. The book deals with the effects of the Saddam Hussein regime, UN sanctions, and of the war on Iraqi civilians.
Explaining why he eventually left the BBC, Omaar suggested that he wanted to operate independently and to take on assignments for people he wished to collaborate with. He also suggested that the BBC working environment was somewhat exclusivist on a class basis, and that he was guilty of this as well to some degree as a consequence of his public school upbringing.
Additionally, Omaar has expressed regret about the way in which he covered the invasion of Iraq during his time as a BBC correspondent. He suggested that he and his colleagues we did pieces on Sadam Hussein, his regime and weapons inspectors, while devoting comparatively little coverage to the Iraqi people. Interviewed in John Pilger's documentary The War You Don't See (2010), Omaar also lamented that "one didn't press the most uncomfortable buttons hard enough" and called the coverage "a giant echo chamber".

Al Jazeera

In September 2006, Omaar joined Al Jazeera English. He served as a Middle Eastern correspondent for its London Division.
During his time with the news organization, Omaar presented the nightly weekday documentary series Witness. He also hosted the monthly The Rageh Omaar Report, his own investigative documentaries.

ITV News

In January 2013, it was announced that Omaar would be joining ITV News as a special correspondent. He was promoted the following year to ITV News' International Affairs Editor.
Since October 2015, as well as his duties as International Affairs Editor, Rageh is now also a Deputy Anchor on ITV News at Ten, sharing this role with Julie Etchingham.

Awards and nominations

In 2003, Omaar was the recipient of an Ethnic Multicultural Media Academy award for the best TV journalist.
In 2008, he was also presented the Arab Media Watch Award for excellence in journalism.
In January 2014 and 2015, Omaar was nominated for the Services to Media award at the British Muslim Awards.