
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.
-
Tech giant Meta has been ordered to pay a nearly $1.3 billion dollar privacy fine in the European Union
-
President Biden and House speaker McCarthy to hold debt ceiling talks. S.C. Republican Sen. Tim Scott will announce his presidential bid. Officials in Columbus, Ohio, are trying to stem gun violence.
-
Syria's President Bashar al-Assad is officially ending years of isolation by the region's powers over his brutal civil war that has killed an estimated half a million people.
-
An expert panel advising the Food and Drug Administration has recommended approval of a Pfizer vaccine that would be the first to protect babies against RSV.
-
Zelenskyy's expected appearance on Sunday comes as Western allies harden their resolve in support of Ukraine. Russia's military aggression toward its neighbor is on top of the G-7 summit's agenda.
-
Ukraine's president will attend the G-7 in person. Leaders from across the Middle East are meeting in Saudi Arabia. Disney says it's cancelling plans to build a $1 billion office campus in Florida.
-
Talk show host and The Real Housewives creator Andy Cohen's fifth book, The Daddy Diaries: The Year I Grew Up, describes how becoming a dad has completely changed his life.
-
The accused leaker of some Pentagon documents was caught earlier with classified material. Pakistani forces surround ex-Prime Minister Imran Kahn's home. Montana is the first state to ban TikTok.
-
President Biden will head to Japan to meet with G7 leaders. He canceled plans to travel on to Australia because of the looming debt ceiling deadline. He also planned to stop in Papua New Guinea.
-
Ukrainian forces claim they've made advances in the battle for Bakhmut — a city in the east that Russia has been trying to capture for more than 10 months.