About Al Jazeera English's Witness

Rageh Omaar presents Al Jazeera English's Witness, a half-hour daily documentary series which features short, specially commissioned or acquired films gathered from independent filmmakers.
 
Each documentary reveals the unknown lives of ordinary people, following their lives, telling their stories and portraying the challenges that confront them.

Witness airs Mondays at 8pm Pacific and Wednesdays at 7pm Eastern, on DIRECTV 375 and DISH 9410.

Watch Al Jazeera English World News before Mosaic Mon-Fri, 7PM PT / 10PM ET, during Link TV's Global News Hour

Witness films cover conflict, belief, the past and the future. As well as bringing new stories to light they showcase the talents of a new breed of multi-skilled, frontline journalist. This striking series was recently nominated for an Emmy.

In the studio, host Rageh Omaar further explores the issues raised in the films, with expert guests on the subject matter and the film-makers themselves.

Rageh Omaar

Before joining the Witness team at Al Jazeera English, Rageh Omaar worked for the BBC as Developing World Correspondent and most recently as Africa Correspondent.
 
Rageh has covered stories ranging from drought in Ethiopia to devastating floods in Mozambique.

His reports during the 2003 Iraq war made him a household name.
 
BBC news bulletins were syndicated across the US, where the Washington Post labelled him the "Scud Stud".
 
Rageh was born in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1967, and moved to Britain as a child, attending school in Cheltenham and gaining an Honours degree in Modern History from Oxford University in 1990.

He began his journalistic career as a trainee at The Voice newspaper in Brixton and worked for a short time on the magazine City Limits before moving to Ethiopia in 1991 where he was a freelance reporter for the BBC World Service.
 
More recently he wrote the biography Only Half of Me: Being a Muslim in Britain and told the human story of the Battle for Iraq in his book Revolution Day.