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.
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Sunni militants of ISIS have raised their black flags in towns they've captured in northern Iraq. But they've had help from, and share a goal with, former members of Saddam Hussein's security forces. -
Sectarian violence continues to escalate in Iraq. The militant group ISIS is maintaining its gains in the northern regions, and suspected Shiite reprisals have dozens in the city of Baaqouba.
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In Mosul, the militant group ISIS is providing cooking fuel to families and otherwise restoring order. But the mixed Shiite and Sunni town of Tal Afar has already seen the brutal face of ISIS. -
Libya faces some of its most serious upheaval since the fall of Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. No one knows that more than the prime minister who wasn't even in office a week before being forced out Monday. -
Less than a year after a coup, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi won the presidential election with more than 90 percent of the vote. -
Egypt has added a third day of voting in its presidential election. With Abdel Fattah al-Sisi relying on voter turnout to legitimize his election, the government-allied media is exhorting Egyptians to vote or be considered traitors.
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Former military chief Abdel Fattah el-Sissi is expected to emerge victorious from Egypt's two-day polling, which began Monday. But the country remains divided.
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A survivor of the Turkish coal mine disaster that killed more than 250 talks about the hours he spent trapped below ground. He's now afraid to return to mining, and wonders how he'll make a living.
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Hope is fading that any more mine workers will be rescued from a mine in western Turkey, where over 280 miners died after an explosion. NPR's Leila Fadel has been at the mine and offers more details.
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An Egyptian judge sentenced hundreds of people to death Monday, including the supreme leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is the judge's second mass-sentencing in recent weeks.
