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Deborah Amos

Credit Steve Barrett

Deborah Amos covers the Middle East for NPR News. Her reports can be heard on NPR's award-winning Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Weekend Edition.

Amos travels extensively across the Middle East covering a range of stories including the rise of well-educated Syria youth who are unqualified for jobs in a market-drive economy, a series focusing on the emerging power of Turkey and the plight of Iraqi refugees.

In 2009, Amos won the Edward Weintal Prize for Diplomatic Reporting from Georgetown University and in 2010 was awarded the Edward R. Murrow Life Time Achievement Award by Washington State University. Amos was part of a team of reporters who won a 2004 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award for coverage of Iraq. A Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1991-1992, Amos was returned to Harvard in 2010 as a Shorenstein Fellow at the Kennedy School.

In 2003, Amos returned to NPR after a decade in television news, including ABC's Nightline and World News Tonight and the PBS programs NOW with Bill Moyers and Frontline.

When Amos first came to NPR in 1977, she worked first as a director and then a producer for Weekend All Things Considered until 1979. For the next six years, she worked on radio documentaries, which won her several significant honors. In 1982, Amos received the Prix Italia, the Ohio State Award, and a DuPont-Columbia Award for "Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown" and in 1984 she received a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for "Refugees."

From 1985 until 1993, Amos spend most of her time at NPR reporting overseas, including as the London Bureau Chief and as an NPR foreign correspondent based in Amman, Jordan. During that time, Amos won several awards, including an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award and a Break thru Award, and widespread recognition for her coverage of the Gulf War in 1991.

A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Amos is also the author of Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East (Public Affairs, 2010) and Lines in the Sand: Desert Storm and the Remaking of the Arab World (Simon and Schuster, 1992).

Amos began her career after receiving a degree in broadcasting from the University of Florida at Gainesville.

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NPR Story
6:11 am
Mon June 11, 2012

Syrian Rebels Bring Fight To Capital

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Credit AFP / Getty Images
A Syrian man carries a wounded girl next to Red Crescent ambulances following an explosion Friday reportedly targeting a military bus near Qudssaya, a neighborhood in Damascus.
Credit AFP/Getty Images
Syrian security forces inspect the scene of an explosion Friday in Damascus.
Credit Reuters / Landov
Free Syrian Army members, with covered faces and holding weapons, sit by the side of a street Monday in the Qaboon district in Damascus.
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Originally published on Tue June 12, 2012 11:11 am

The fighting in Syria escalated again on Monday as the Syrian army pounded the central cities of Homs and Hama, two places that have been the scene of repeated clashes.

U.N. monitors confirmed mortar fire, heavy artillery and machine gun fire in the assaults. A live streaming video from Homs showed billowing smoke from explosions and the rattle of gunfire.

Activists in Homs say more than 50 people have died, and they called for immediate assistance for the scores of wounded who, they say, are being treated by paramedic and medial students.

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Middle East
6:14 pm
Fri June 8, 2012

In A Syrian Village, Evidence Of A Slaughter

Credit Edlib News Network / AP
Anti-government protesters in the northern Syrian village of Hass protest on Thursday following the deaths of dozens of civilians a day earlier in the village of Mazraat al-Qubair. The banner reads, "The al-Qubair massacre challenges the world's humanity."
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Originally published on Fri June 8, 2012 10:03 pm

NPR correspondent Deborah Amos joined U.N. monitors and a small group of journalists Friday who were able to enter the Syrian village of Mazraat al-Qubair, where 78 people, including women and children, were killed on Wednesday by pro-government forces, according to opposition activists.

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The Two-Way
6:22 pm
Thu June 7, 2012

In Syria, Some Places 'Are Already Living The Civil War'

Credit AP
A Syrian boy sits in the rubble of house which was destroyed during a military operation by the Syrian pro-Assad army in April in the town of Taftanaz, Syria.
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NPR's Deborah Amos has been covering the uprising in Syria since it began more than a year ago. Like other foreign reporters, she has had to cover much of the conflict from afar because the Syrian government has only rarely granted visas. She has just returned to Syria for the first time since last fall and sent this dispatch:

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Middle East
10:37 am
Thu May 31, 2012

Preaching Nonviolence, Syrian Activist Heads Home

Credit Jeff Watts / American University
Sheik Jawdat Said, 81, has been urging nonviolent protest in Syria for decades, and has been arrested many times. A scholar and an activist, shown here speaking at American University in Washington in March, he is heading back to Syria this week and plans to resume his call for peaceful opposition to the government.
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Syria's foremost proponent of nonviolent protest says he's returning to Damascus this week and will keep delivering his long-standing message despite the country's worsening bloodshed.

Sheik Jawdat Said is an 81-year-old Islamic scholar whose books and teachings helped inspire young Syrian activists to challenge the regime in peaceful protests last year.

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Middle East
6:33 am
Sun May 13, 2012

Largely Unseen, Syria Carries Out Arrest Campaign

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Credit AFP/Getty Images
Syrian President Bashar Assad's government has waged a two-pronged campaign against the opposition, critics say. His military continues to fight, while nonviolent activists are being detained in increasing numbers, according to monitoring groups.
Credit Yin Bogu / Xinhua/Landov
While fighting continues in Syria, the government has been detaining many nonviolent activists, according to monitoring groups. Here, Syrian soldiers are shown on a bridge in Damascus last November.
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President Bashar Assad's regime has launched a new and sweeping arrest campaign of opposition activists and intellectuals in the past few weeks, according to Western analysts and diplomats.

The growing tally of arrests has gone largely unnoticed, overshadowed by the daily violence that threatens to jeopardize the U.N. peace plan. But in combination, both are undermining the already faint hopes of peace.

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Middle East
10:22 am
Thu April 19, 2012

For Syria, A 'Lawrence Of Arabia' Moment

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Credit AP
Syrians walk through a badly damaged neighborhood in the central city of Homs on Sunday. Despite a declared cease-fire, fighting has continued in a number of Syrian cities, and peace efforts are at risk of collapsing.
Credit Mohammad Hannon / AP
Syrian opposition fighters stand watch in a suburb of Damascus, Syria, on April 6. A cease-fire was declared several days later, but shooting has continued.
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In the final scenes of the classic film Lawrence of Arabia, the Arab rebel fighters are wrapped up with internal, petty squabbles in Damascus as the great powers maneuver for the future of Syria.

Now, nearly a century after the events depicted in that movie, there's a similar Lawrence of Arabia moment playing out in Syria.

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Middle East
10:39 am
Wed April 11, 2012

At The Met: A Middle East Transition, Centuries Ago

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Credit Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Art Resource, NY / The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Met's exhibit examines Christian Byzantium and Islam as they first came into contact in the Middle East in the seventh to ninth centuries. This ivory carving is from what is known as the Grado Chair, a Christian artifact from the Eastern Mediterranean or Egypt in the seventh to eighth century.
Credit The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Silver chalices made in Syria in the sixth or seventh century. They are known as the Attarouthi Treasure, named after the prosperous Byzantine merchant town of Attarouthi.
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Originally published on Wed May 23, 2012 10:53 am

The yearlong tumult of the Arab Spring has reached all the way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

A stunning and timely new show, "Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition," covers exactly the places caught up in modern day revolts, and many of the developments from more than a millennium ago are closely linked to the events of today.

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Middle East
11:36 am
Wed March 14, 2012

Aid Group's Role In Syria Pushes Limits

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Credit Michael Sohn / AP
Campaigners from the international advocacy group Avaaz protest Russian arms sales to the Syrian government during a demonstration in front of the Russian Embassy in Berlin on Nov. 2.
Credit Reuters TV / Reuters /Landov
British photographer Paul Conroy lies on a stretcher as he is treated by a doctor in Homs on Feb. 22. Avaaz coordinated Conroy's rescue from the embattled city, an operation that left 13 Syrian activists dead.
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Originally published on Wed March 14, 2012 1:07 pm

A year into the Syrian uprising, with the world community reluctant to intervene, one international group has taken a direct and risky role in Syria — even taking part in the high-profile rescue of Western journalists from the besieged city of Homs.

Avaaz, a global online pressure group based in New York, has given crucial support to the uprising and the Syrian activist networks that aim to topple the regime of President Bashar Assad.

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The Two-Way
2:35 pm
Fri February 17, 2012

A Passion To Bear Witness: Why War Correspondents Take The Risk

Credit Steven Senne / AP
Shadid won two Pulitzer prizes for international reporting, in 2004 and 2010. Here, he poses on the campus of Brown University in the year of his second win.
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Originally published on Wed May 23, 2012 11:01 am

Journalists don't talk about the danger. They don't usually recount the moments of agonizing terror that come after a bad decision to continue on down the road as the faint sound of mortar shells grows louder.

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Africa
4:27 pm
Tue February 7, 2012

In Morocco, The Arab Spring's Mixed Bounty

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Credit Abdeljalil Bounhar / AP
Relatives of Abdelwahab Zaydoun, a 27-year-old Moroccan who set himself on fire to protest his unemployment and died from his burns, react to his death in Casablanca last month. A year after street protests in Morocco prompted some reforms, Moroccans remain discontent with the gap between rich and poor, and the slow strides toward democracy.
Credit Spencer Platt / Getty Images
A Moroccan mother and child beg for money in Rabat, Morocco, last year. About 15 percent of the population lives on $2 a day, and the literacy rate is little more than 50 percent.
Credit Lionel Bonaventure / AFP/Getty Images
Moroccan King Mohammed VI (shown here in Tangiers in September) moved quickly to placate the protesters of the Feb. 20 movement. Now, though, the limits of those reforms are being tested.
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Originally published on Tue February 7, 2012 6:26 pm

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