PARIS: A French journalist who survived a landmine blast in Iraq that killed three of his colleagues last month was awarded France’s highest journalism prize on Tuesday.

The jury of the Albert Londres prize praised Samuel Forey of the Figaro newspaper for the “tenderness and humanity” of his coverage of the battle for Mosul.

Forey, 36, was slightly wounded in the explosion a fortnight ago that claimed the lives of three fellow journalists: Veronique Robert of Stephan Villeneuve of France and Kurdish reporter Bakhtiyar Haddad.

He had been covering Iraqi and Kurdish attempts to take the city from the militant Islamic State group since last autumn.

His best seller Les Revenants (roughly translated as “The Returned”) is built on long interviews with francophone members of IS, and has been credited with shifting French thinking on radical Islam.

The Franco-British reporter David Thomson picked up the inaugural Albert Londres book prize for his investigation into what drives French, Belgian and Tunisian jihadis.

Thomson, 37, who works for RFI radio, talked to more than 100 fighters, some of whom told him they wanted to return to Europe from Syria to commit terrorist acts.

Published in Dawn, July 5th, 2017