Leila Fadel
Leila Fadel is a national correspondent for NPR based in Los Angeles, covering issues of culture, diversity, and race.
Most recently, she was NPR's international correspondent based in Cairo and covered the wave of revolts in the Middle East and their aftermaths in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, and beyond. Her stories brought us to the heart of a state-ordered massacre of pro-Muslim Brotherhood protesters in Cairo in 2013 when police shot into crowds of people to clear them and killed between 1,000 and 2,000 people. She told us the tales of a coup in Egypt and what it is like for a country to go through a military overthrow of an elected government. She covered the fall of Mosul to ISIS in 2014 and documented the harrowing tales of the Yazidi women who were kidnapped and enslaved by the group. Her coverage also included stories of human smugglers in Egypt and the Syrian families desperate and willing to pay to risk their lives and cross a turbulent ocean for Europe.
She was awarded the Lowell Thomas Award from the Overseas Press Club for her coverage of the 2013 coup in Egypt and the toll it took on the country and Egyptian families. In 2017 she earned a Gracie award for the story of a single mother in Tunisia whose two eldest daughters were brainwashed and joined ISIS. The mother was fighting to make sure it didn't happen to her younger girls.
Before joining NPR, she covered the Middle East for The Washington Post as the Cairo Bureau Chief. Prior to her position as Cairo Bureau Chief for the Post, she covered the Iraq war for nearly five years with Knight Ridder, McClatchy Newspapers, and later the Washington Post. Her foreign coverage of the devastating human toll of the Iraq war earned her the George. R. Polk award in 2007. In 2016 she was the Council on Foreign Relations Edward R. Murrow fellow.
Leila Fadel is a Lebanese-American journalist who speaks conversational Arabic and was raised in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon.
-
Rep. Raskin is one of the people Biden pardoned before he left office. Raskin says it's strange to be pardoned for doing his job. -
NPR's Leila Fadel speaks with Axios senior climate reporter Andrew Freedman about the incoming Arctic blast that's expected to bring dangerously cold temperatures to large parts of the U.S.
-
For Shaymaa Ahmed, a 21-year-old engineering student in Gaza, a cease-fire means she can finally mourn her own family. -
Jonathan Dekel-Chen, whose son Sagui is believed to be alive and among the Israeli hostages seized by Hamas in the Oct. 7 attacks, says the ceasefire deal is a way 'to end the madness in Gaza.' -
NPR's Leila Fadel talks to Marlon Sorge of The Aerospace Corporation, which researches space debris issues including who is responsible when man-made objects fall from space.
-
NPR's Leila Fadel asks the president of the local chapter of the Service Employees International Union about why the team is dropping an effort to unionize.
-
World Health Organization director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who escaped an Israeli airstrike in Yemen, says Gaza's health crisis is indescribable and is calling for a ceasefire. -
People in Syria are looking for their relatives and friends in prisons, hospitals and morgues. The U.N. estimates over 100,00 people have gone missing in Syria under the Assad regime. -
With Bashar al-Assad gone, survivors of his regime's chemical attacks share their stories. NPR met a father who was forced for years to stay silent about how his children were killed. -
Morning Edition host Leila Fadel reports from Damascus, in the first week in a half-century that the Assad family did not rule the country.
