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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Some people are already voting in this year’s election, and some people are already planning to challenge the vote. We’ll hear how election officials are trying to secure their work.
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NPR's Leila Fadel speaks with Dr. Elias Warrak, an ophthalmologist who has treated blast victims in and around Beirut following a series of deadly explosions of handheld devices across Lebanon.
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NPR's Leila Fadel speaks with Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute, about a contentious exchange at a Senate hearing on hate crimes.
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Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina, faces pressure to withdraw after reports that he made racist, homophobic and sexually explicit comments online.
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Did Israel's alleged use of explosives in pagers in Lebanon break international law? NPR's Leila Fadel talks to Brian Finucane, senior adviser to the International Crisis Group.
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Election officials monitor voting underway in general election. Right-wing influencers try to find evidence Haitian immigrants in Ohio ate pets. Few patients have signed up for sickle cell treatment.
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A documentary follows the world of competitive high-school mariachi performance. "Going Varsity in Mariachi" is now streaming on Netflix.
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In Lebanon, victims were buried after a cyberattack Tuesday that detonated thousands of hand-held pagers used by the militant group Hezbollah. The next day there was a second wave of attacks.
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Is the U.S. banning TikTok essentially censorship? NPR's Leila Fadel speaks with an attorney whose firm filed a petition on behalf of a TikTok creator seeking to stop the U.S. ban.
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For a second day devices were turned into bombs in Lebanon. The explosions are the latest in a series of attacks attributed to Israel. The Teamsters are not endorsing a 2024 presidential candidate.