Edward Reinhard Girardet is a European-American journalist, editor, author and adventurer born in White Plains, New York on 24 March 1951, and currently based in Geneva, Switzerland. Having lived much of his youth in the United States, Bahamas, Canada and Germany, he completed his high school education at Clifton College, a British public school in Bristol, UK, and then Nottingham University, where he studied German literature. On graduating, he went to Paris to become a foreign correspondent.As a reporter for The Christian Science Monitor, US News and World Report and the PBS MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour but now other media, he has covered wars and humanitarian crisis zones in Africa, Asia, the Balkans and Central America. He is widely regarded as one of the most informed international journalists on Afghanistan and humanitarian media issues. His latest book, Killing the Cranes, is considered a classic.Girardet has written or edited various books, mainly about Afghanistan but also Africa and media. His 1985 book Afghanistan: The Soviet War was one of the first books based on personal experience about the Soviet war, the Afghan resistance and clandestine humanitarian cross-border support. He often trekked hundreds of miles across the Hindu Kush to report the Red Army war. Girardet was also the first American reporter to meet and write about Afghan resistance leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud in the summer of 1981. Girardet narrowly escaped being killed, or at least serious injury in September, 1981 when he travelled up to northern Afghanistan to see Massoud just before the latter was assassinated by two Al-Qaeda operatives. Posing as journalists, the two suicide bombers lived in the guesthouse room in Khoja Bauhouddin next to Girardet, who was on assignment for National Geographic. Girardet left several days before the assassination on 9 September 2001 because, as he wrote in Killing the Cranes, he had to get back to Europe for his wife's birthday on 13 September.Girardet edited Somalia, Rwanda and Beyond: The Role of the International Media in Wars and Humanitarian Crises published by Columbia University Press and Crosslines Global Report in 1995. Girardet has co-produced and reported various television documentaries filming, sometimes clandestinely, in places such as Western New Guinea, Haiti, Zambia, Angola, Mozambique and El Salvador. He was reporter on the BBC2 documentary "Frontline Doctors" about Medecins sans Frontières (MSF) during the 1990s produced by French film-makers Christophe de Ponfilly and Frederic Laffont. Girardet was also editor of Populations in Danger with MSF published by Routledge in 1996 and contributed the chapter on Liberia.Together with British editor and former Gurkha officer Jonathan Walter, Girardet co-edited and wrote The Essential Field Guide to Afghanistan in 1998 published by Crosslines Global Report and Media Action International. This is aimed at helping aid workers, diplomats, soldiers, journalists and others to be
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