He has ten years of experience from across the Middle East and North Africa, including countries like Iraq, Libya, Tunisia, Somalia, Syria, Egypt, Morocco, and beyond. Sam focuses on protest movements, national security issues, migration, armed conflict, and minority rights. 

His work has appeared in outlets such as The Intercept, Foreign Policy, TIME, The Guardian, the Associated Press, and many others. 

Sam has worked in the region as an independent journalist, communications consultant, and social researcher. He has spent time as a Strategic Communications consultant with the likes of UNDP Iraq, UNDP Libya, UNICEF and UN Women. With these organizations, he provided strategic communications plans as well as content, and offered trainings to and collaborated with local media professionals. He has also worked as a human story writer with UN organizations, from Ethiopia to Lebanon to Morocco.

Sam is also active in podcasting, having given a radio reporting training to rookie reporters in Mosul, in Iraq. He has since been working with a team to create an English-language podcast series offering context and history about Iraq for American listeners based on original recordings from Mosul.

With his colleague, photographer Paula González Gavilanes, Sam has co-founded Ixaya Media and Research. The company aims to offer high-level journalistic trainings to local journalists, connect them with international publishing outlets, as well as create a network of on-the-ground researchers/journalists to provide fine-grained social research in hard-to-reach places to international organizations.

Sam hails from Warwick, New York, and studied anthropology and creative writing at the City College of New York and art and Middle East politics at New York University. He speaks English, French, Standard Arabic and multiple Arabic dialects, basic Kurdish, and has recently started studying Spanish.