Safaa Khalaf is an Iraqi investigative journalist and researcher in the field of sociology and crisis analysis. He is winner of the 2017 Naseej Prize for diversity and cultural pluralism, presented by the French Agency for the Development of Media (CFI), and was shortlisted for the Thomson Reuters Foundation's 2018 Kurt Schork Memorial Prize. He is winner of the Investigative category's 2022 European Union Press Freedom (Samir Kassir Award). He was also a researcher with the London School of Economics (LSE) between 2019-2022 on the Iraq protests. In 2019, he published his investigative book: Iraq after ISIS - Crises of Over-Optimism.