Idris Hassan-Kamara

Idris Hassan-Kamara, 28, is the youngest author in the lane and the only one without a university degree. They were born in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in 1997 to a Krio mother who worked at a hospital laundry and a Mandingo father who drove a taxi, and the family moved to Manchester, England, when Idris was nine, settling in Moss Side. They left a chemistry undergraduate program at the University of Manchester in 2017 — three months before final exams — to take a junior researcher post at a small open-source-investigation outfit called North Light, where they taught themselves geolocation and satellite-image verification. By 2021 they were doing primary OSINT work on Sahel armed groups for major outlets, by 2023 a contributing investigator at the BBC and a regular byline at Bellingcat. They are nonbinary, use they/them pronouns, and were openly so in print starting in 2020 after a colleague was outed and harassed. They live in a flat in Hulme with a partner who teaches secondary-school maths, two cats named Saidu and Aminata, and a wall of monitors that the partner has stopped commenting on. They read voraciously and chaotically — Ryszard Kapuściński next to a manual on radar imagery — and credit their style to having to teach themselves to write reports clear enough that editors with no geographic background could follow them. They are sharply suspicious of think-tank framings of African conflicts, deeply allergic to the word 'terrorism' as deployed in Western press, and refuse to anonymize Sahelian sources without genuine cause. They drink instant coffee. They have never been to a journalism school and intend never to attend one.