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.
-
NPR's Leila Fadel speaks with Mitski about her new album The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We. -
Depeche Mode return with its first album since the death of founding member Andy Fletcher. It focuses a lot, unsurprisingly, on the subject of life.
-
Raised in lily-white Cape Cod, Mass. while one of the few persons of color around, Esperanza found their voice the old-fashioned way: by searching for it.
-
Pink Floyd's historic album Dark Side of the Moon turns 50 years old today – cognitive psychologist Daniel Levitin joins us to discuss its twisting psychological themes.
-
Hayley Williams was just a teenager when her band Paramore became a pop-punk favorite – now in her 30s, Paramore is back with an album that shows pop/punk can age gracefully. It's called This Is Why.
-
In an interview with Morning Edition's Leila Fadel, the fast-rising artist talks about a life path as winding and varied as his music.
-
Tank and the Bangas' third studio album, Red Balloon, celebrates Black life and reckons with America's ills. NPR's Leila Fadel talks to lead singer Tarriona "Tank" Ball.
-
Protesters nationwide are demanding police reform. Calls to defund the police mean different things to different people, and there's no clear answer to what that might look like in reality.
-
The place where George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, is now transformed, at least temporarily, into a daily rememberance. People gather to heal, to protest and to be together.
-
As break-ins and fires raged in the first days of protests over the killing of George Floyd, Minneapolis seemed to descend into a security vacuum. So volunteers stepped in to try to fill the void.
-
Somali immigrant Safia Munye opened the Minneapolis restaurant Mama Safia's Kitchen with her retirement savings. It was destroyed. "This can be replaced. George's life cannot," she says.
-
The demand for public transportation has dropped dramatically since the pandemic began. But many essential workers in Los Angeles never stopped taking the bus to and from work every day.
