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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Audie Cornish talks to NPR's Leila Fadel in Cairo about the ongoing trial of Al-Jazeera journalists. The journalists have now been in jail for more than 100 days.
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More than 500 people in Matea, Egypt, have been sentenced to death. On one street alone, a juice store owner, a sweets shop owner, a doctor and more than 20 others have been condemned.
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A judge this week sentenced more than 500 men to death for the killing of a policeman. He's now presiding over a case with 700 defendants as the country's courts come under increasing criticism. -
Two ousted presidents, journalists and many activists are all on trial in the overburdened court system. Many cases stem from the country's political turmoil and there's no guarantee of a fair trial.
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In post-Gadhafi Libya, the militias, not the military, provide security 鈥� what little there is of it. Even as world powers lend help, rebuilding the gutted army is proceeding at a glacial pace. -
Thursday marks the opening day of a Cairo trial for Al-Jazeera journalists, who have been jailed on terrorism charges. The case is a sign of the dangerous conditions for the press in Egypt.
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The first fissures witnessed in 2011 have blown wide open, and the country has morphed into the Wild West. One activist who returned to Libya to support the revolution, says the dreams of a new Libya are at risk. -
The Libyan uprising against Moammar Gadhafi was launched three years ago this month. The post-revolutionary situation has gone from bad to worse, with militias overrunning the government in some Libyan cities.
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The Egyptian security forces have targeted the Muslim Brotherhood, which is now classified as a terrorist group. But the crackdown has gone well beyond the one Islamist organization and now encompasses most everyone voicing dissent. -
Ousted Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi was in a Cairo courtroom on Tuesday, seen and heard for only the second time since he was thrust from office in a military coup last July. Morsi and other members of the Muslim Brotherhood are facing charges of collusion with Hamas and Hezbollah during the 2011 uprising against the Mubarak regime.
