Scott Peterson is the Mideast/London Bureau Chief for The Christian Science Monitor newspaper and a photographer for Getty Images. One of the most well-traveled and experienced foreign correspondent/photographers of his generation, he has reported and photographed conflict and powerful human narratives across three continents for nearly four decades.
Current work includes 10 journeys during the current conflict in Ukraine, since Russia’s 2022 invasion, and frequent forays to Lebanon and Syria.
As a photographer for Gamma Liaison Agency and then Getty Images in New York, Scott’s work has appeared in major news magazines from Time and the NYTimes Magazine to Paris Match.
Scott cut his teeth travelling the width and breadth of Africa by motorcycle, river barge, and hitchhiking. He first began covering the Middle East in 1990, from the start if the first Persian Gulf War, and traveled to northern Iraq during the Kurdish Uprising against Saddam Hussein in 1991.
Based in Africa for six years in the early 1990s for The Daily Telegraph of London, his extensive frontline visits across the continent, more than 50 trips to Somalia during the famine and UN and US intervention, and long forays into Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, yielded his critically acclaimed book Me Against My Brother: At War in Somalia, Sudan, and Rwanda.
Based in Croatia, he worked in Bosnia and across the former Yugoslavia toward the end of the Balkan wars, and covered the fall of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.
As a staff correspondent for the Monitor from 1996 based in Amman, Jordan, Scott reported on the Middle East from Algiers to Beirut to Tehran. As Moscow Bureau Chief he later covered all of Russia, the former Soviet Republics, and Central Asia. In Afghanistan he traveled with the Taliban in 1999, later witnessed their collapse when Kabul fell in 2001, and has made repeated visits.
Scott has made 45 trips to Iran, which formed the basis of his book, "Let the Swords Encircle Me – A Journey Behind the Headlines." He has made many more journeys to Iraq, during the Saddam era and throughout the US occupation. He embedded with US Marines during their 2004 assault on Fallujah and still carries shrapnel in his arm from that offensive.
Web: www.s-peterson.com
Insta: Peterson__scott
