Sky News correspondents look back at 2025

It has been a turbulent year. Wars have erupted or dragged on, international crises have deepened - but there have been bright spots too.

Our Sky News correspondents have been on the ground all through 2025, bringing you the full story first.

Here's what they have seen - and why it's important to them.

Adam Parsons, Middle East correspondent, on his time in Gaza

I will always remember the first time I went into Gaza.

The Israeli military took a group of journalists to a place called Tel el-Hawa, a suburb of Gaza City, where the war was raging.

The army controlled where we went, what we saw, and when we arrived and left, but even allowing for those restrictions, it was still an extraordinary experience.

It was a long journey to get there, starting in Hummers and moving into armoured personnel carriers.

When we arrived, the door slid open and reality smacked you. The booms of explosions and the chatter of gunfire were nearby, echoing on the walls of bombed-out houses.

There were warnings to look out for snipers, and people's abandoned possessions were strewn on the ground.

But what will stick with me are two things - the utter devastation all around us, with a landscape of grey dust, rubble and shattered buildings, and secondly, the simple lack of life.

Not only were there no civilians, but also no animals, no flowers, no grass and not even a bird in the sky.

Stuart Ramsay, chief correspondent, on a year of free Syria

Reporting on the evolution of Syria from a country at war with Bashar al Assad as president, to a country rid of him and trying to rebuild itself, has provided me with some of the most memorable moments of my year of reporting.

My relationship with Syria goes back to 2011. During the Arab Spring, I was one of a handful of journalists who reported from inside rebel areas of Syria, meeting the thousands of ordinary people attempting to bring about political change in their country.

They finally did get their change, and I could not believe that I was standing in the middle of a square in Damascus as they celebrated.

Since then, the stories I have covered from Syria have been far from easy - outbreaks of horrendous sectarian violence on the country’s Mediterranean coast, investigations into the former regime’s bloody campaign of torture and murder against its own citizens and witnessing the pain of people trying to find their missing loved ones were a constant theme.

But there have been moments of happiness, even euphoria, as the Syrian people slowly began to realise that the 50 years of the Assad dynasty’s dictatorship were over, never to return.

I was wanted by the Assad regime - an arrest warrant was issued because of my reporting from opposition areas, but this year I could, for the first time, walk freely in Damascus, eat in restaurants, drive north along roads in normal traffic, free from the threat of Assad’s security forces that throttled this country.

That was liberating for me. Imagine how much more liberating it is for Syrians to be free?

There is not a clearly defined happy ending, of course, the country still faces many problems both internally, with a government trying to find its way, and externally, with the international community watching like hawks, making sure Syria will not once again fall back into violence.

But a friend in Syria sent me a text on the anniversary of the fall of Assad: “We are living our best days in Syria, and celebrate the anniversary of liberation,” he wrote.

“We will rebuild our country, come witness it.”

“I will,” I replied. And I plan to do that.

Read more:
'Opportunity and huge jeopardy': Syria one year on

Tom Parmenter, national correspondent, on the immigration debate

The UK’s battlelines over immigration deepened even further in 2025.

The sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl in Epping in July triggered furious and at times violent protests.

At first, it was outside the Bell Hotel in Epping where the man responsible was being housed - Ethiopian Hadush Kebatu had only arrived on a small boat days earlier.

Then we saw demonstrations at other asylum hotels. People mobilised - some organising counter-protests. Others put union flags up across the nation.

For some, it was an expression of national solidarity - for others, it exacerbated the idea they were living in a hostile environment.

Racist incidents spiked. People also felt unsafe not knowing who was living in their communities. Politicians who dismissed the protests as simply “far right” were not seeing the full story.

Fury felt over a chaotic immigration system, then turned to farce.

The sex offender who triggered the protests in Epping was released by mistake from prison.

We followed a fast-moving manhunt around London before he was caught and promptly deported to Ethiopia.

Remarkably, it wasn't a one-off - it turned out the underfunded prison service has been losing inmates at an alarming rate.

At one point in November, we were following two further manhunts - one inmate did the decent thing and handed himself back in.

The other, an Algerian sex offender, was on the run for two weeks. Sky News caught up with him shortly before the police arrested him.

“It’s not my f****** fault!” he yelled at me.

It was surreal, and yet another story 2025 where you come away asking: "What is going on in our country?"

Martha Kelner, US correspondent, on her viral encounter with Marjorie Taylor Greene

My most remarkable moment of the year was an encounter I had with Marjorie Taylor Greene, a house representative from Georgia.

I'm not sure I will ever forget standing in the Capitol building, inside the US government's corridors of power and being told by a sitting member of Congress to "go back to [my] own country".

I was berated by MTG, as she's known here, for asking very reasonable questions about Signalgate.

It was a scandal about leading members of the administration, including defence secretary Pete Hegseth and vice president JD Vance, using Signal, a less secure communication platform, to discuss military strikes on the Houthis in Yemen, a matter of international interest.

I knew Taylor Greene had a reputation for being feisty, but I didn't expect such a vicious outburst.

The exchange soon went viral, I think because it demonstrates how much things have changed in the second Trump term, where normal codes of conduct don't apply.

MTG and US President Donald Trump may have fallen out now, after the congresswoman went up against him on big issues, but she was just taking her cues from her old friend.

Because the president is also disdainful towards certain journalists, calling them "Piggy" and "stupid" and "nasty" when they ask questions he doesn't like.

Yousra Elbagir, Africa correspondent, on the war in Sudan

In September, we finally made it into North Darfur after two years of trying to cross over into Sudan's western region from Chad.

Two decades on from the genocide of the early 2000s, Darfur is being ravaged by armed violence at the hands of the same Janjaweed militias - now with more power and sophisticated weapons than ever before as the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

We met people with incredible bravery and commitment to helping the vulnerable, starved and displaced populations that were fleeing the regional capital, Al Fashir, as the RSF tightened their 18-month siege.

They all warned us that Al Fashir's fall to the RSF would be catastrophic - one man who fled the city and had the scars to prove it looked me dead in the eye and said "if Al Fashir falls, the whole of Sudan will fall".

Weeks later, we were reporting on the capture of Al Fashir by the RSF and the mass atrocities they were committing as people attempted to flee.

Civilians were shot dead in killing fields around the city in trophy videos shared by RSF fighters, and others were rounded up in a school in a nearby town, and they said they were forced to bury the captives who were executed by the RSF based on ethnicity.

This was the catastrophe we were warned about - the horror of massacres so bloody and brutal that corpses and red stains were seen from space.

As this all unfolded, our deployment to Darfur stayed at the forefront of my mind.

The voice of Dr Afaf, a volunteer from Al Fashir helping thousands of people through the Emergency Response Rooms, kept ringing out: "I direct my blame to the international community - where is the humanity?"

(c) Sky News 2025: Sky News correspondents look back at 2025