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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NPR's Leila Fadel speaks with outgoing NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg about his decade in office and the challenges faced by the North Atlantic alliance. -
Banning smartphones in schools is one of those rare policies that Republicans and Democrats seem to agree on but it hasn’t always been a popular idea — so what’s changed?
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If you buy a plane ticket or a car rental, you might get asked if you want to buy carbon offsets to reduce climate pollution. Is there any way to know if those carbon offsets are legit?
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Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun testifies on Capitol Hill. Two growing wildfires upend life in New Mexico. Ascension, one of the nation's largest health systems, deals with the effects of a ransomware attack.
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President Biden is expected to announce a new executive action to shield certain migrants from deportation at a White House event on Tuesday.
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NPR’s Leila Fadel speaks with Benjamin Preston of Consumer Reports, about why catalytic converter thefts remain a nationwide problem.
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As many as 10 states could hold referendums on abortion rights this fall -- possibly redrawing the map for abortion access and influencing other presidential and congressional elections on the ballot.
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More University of California academic workers are expected to go on strike Tuesday in response to the treatment of pro-Palestinian protestors on campus.
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Former President Trump's criminal trial keeps him in New York City much of the week. This means campaign stops at a Harlem Bodega, and a rally in the Bronx.
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Bethlehem: A Celebration of Palestinian Food is a love letter to Kattan's boyhood home — and the scents and flavors that made it a special place to learn how to cook.
