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 ed ISIS. The mother was fighting to make sure it didn't happen to her younger girls.
Before ing 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.
NPR speaks with a British orthopedic surgeon who just returned from his fourth medical mission to Gaza. He says many people he operated on were civilians and were shot while trying to reach food aid.- Trump issues travel ban on 12 countries and partial restrictions on 7 others, Senate begins work on budget bill to enact Trump agenda, the latest on U.S. talks with Iran over their nuclear program.
- In their memoir "Our Dear Friends In Moscow," Russian journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan explain how their friendships with others ruptured as Russia grew isolated from the West.
- The Senate is getting to work this week on President Trump's signature domestic policy bill. But growing concerns about its projected impact on the deficit are complicating its path to age.
- A group running food distribution sites in Gaza says it has put its operations on hold Wednesday. That's after a shooting that killed 27 people, according to hospitals and health officials in Gaza.
- President Trump on Tuesday formally asked Congress to cancel funds it has already approved for foreign aid and public media. Congress has 45 days to approve or reject these requests.
- Tariffs on imported metals double to 50% on Wednesday, Trump asks Congress to cancel funding already approved for foreign aid and public media, the latest updates on aid distribution in Gaza.
- those assignments when you were little about what you wanted to be when you grow up? You might hear doctor, astronaut or Navy SEAL. Jonny Kim has been all three.
- Millions of people around the world live with acute hunger. NPR's Leila Fadel talks with a mother of eleven who has survived a famine in Somalia brought on by drought and years of conflict.
- Hungary's Viktor Orbán has chipped away at institutions that make a democracy healthy, including the judiciary, where he has stacked courts with loyalists, reduced judges' pay and limited expression.