I am very happy to announce that Humza Jilani is joining the Business desk's international team to be our Persian Gulf correspondent, a new role based in Dubai.

Humza's beat will have wide scope aimed at the business, money and geopolitics of a crucial and volatile part of the world. It will touch on a range of areas including economics, tech and A.I., finance, markets, trade, supply chains and, of course, energy. As our only business journalist in the Middle East, Humza will collaborate regularly with reporters from Business and International.

Humza was most recently The Financial Times's correspondent in Islamabad, where he investigated the Pakistani military's business ventures and chronicled the rise of Asim Munir, the army chief widely seen as the country's de facto ruler. He wrote about Pakistan's pop music renaissance and a gold rush in Islamic banking. He also reported from Afghanistan, profiling the property dealers, budding cricket stars and female entrepreneurs scraping by amid one of the world's largest reverse-migration crises.

Humza got his start in journalism through a freshman-year internship at Foreign Policy magazine, followed by stints at Reuters, The Economist and The Wall Street Journal.

His interest in the Persian Gulf dates to a 2013 trip to Saudi Arabia, where his father lived and worked for a decade. In Pakistan, Humza took up mountaineering. This summer, he came within 200 feet of the summit of a 20,000-foot peak in the remote Pamirs before he was forced to retreat because of a low snowpack and an impending blizzard.

Please join me in welcoming Humza, whose first day will be today.

- Rich