Quil Lawrence

Award-winning foreign correspondent David Aquila ("Quil") Lawrence joined NPR in 2009 as Baghdad Bureau Chief. He has covered Iraq regularly since 2000, and reported from all the neighboring countries. His previous posting was Jerusalem, as Middle East correspondent for The World from Public Radio International and the BBC.

Lawrence began his career as a freelancer for NPR and various newspapers based in Bogota, Colombia, and covering Latin America. Other reporting trips took him to Sudan, Morocco, Cuba, Pakistan and Iran. Lawrence covered the fall of the Taliban in December 2001 and returned to Afghanistan periodically to report on development, the drug trade and insurgency. He recently published his first book, Invisible Nation: How the Kurds' Quest for Statehood is Shaping Iraq and the Middle East.

A native of Maine, Lawrence studied history at Brandeis University, with concentrations in the Middle East and Latin America. He is fluent in Spanish and conversant in Arabic.