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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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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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Middle East
12:41 pm
Thu February 2, 2012

30 Years Later, Photos Emerge From Killings In Syria

Credit Courtesy of Abu Jade
This week marks the 30th anniversary of the Hama massacre of 1982 in central Syria. According to Abu Aljude, who was 16 at the time, these images are documentation of the destruction by President Hafez Assad's regime. In this image, Aljude identifies a bombed Christian church.
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Originally published on Wed May 23, 2012 11:03 am

Syria's protest generation is obsessed with images.

Thousands of videos have been posted on YouTube during the 10-month revolt against President Bashar Assad's regime, even as regime snipers take deadly aim at the photographers.

The smugglers who carry critical medical supplies to underground clinics in protest cities also smuggle in cameras hidden in baseball caps and pocket pens. The obsession comes from the conviction that documenting the brutality will stop it — this time.

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Africa
12:01 am
Fri January 27, 2012

In Morocco, Unemployment Can Be A Full-Time Job

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Credit Abdeljalil Bounhar / AP
Demonstrators carry posters of Abdelwahab Zaydoun, who set himself on fire and died from his burns Tuesday. Zaydoun was part of a movement protesting unemployment in Morocco.
Credit Deborah Amos / NPR
Activists gather to march against youth unemployment in the Moroccan capital of Rabat. Protesters wear colored vests with the slogan of their respective groups.
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It is rush hour in Rabat, the Moroccan capital, and time for the march of unemployed college graduates.

They are part of a movement that has become a rite of passage. It's a path to a government career for a lucky few, even though it can take years.

"I have a degree, a master's degree in English, and I'm here ... idle without a job, without dignity, without anything," protester Abdul Rahim Momneh says.

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Africa
6:31 am
Sun January 22, 2012

In Morocco, Islamists Learn To Work With A King

Credit Paul Schemm / AP
Morocco's Islamist Justice and Development Party heads the country's new government, the result of snap elections called by the king. Here, Abdelilah Benkirane, the party's secretary general and now prime minister, arrives for an election rally in Sale on Nov. 1. The party now faces political as well as economic challenges.
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An Islamist party heads Morocco's newly elected government, part of a wave of Islamist election victories following uprisings across North Africa.

But Morocco's case is a bit different. King Mohammed VI responded quickly to a pro-democracy movement last year with a new constitution and snap elections. The Justice and Development Party, known as the PJD, won the most votes in November. Now, Moroccans ask: How will this popular Islamist party govern?

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Africa
12:01 am
Fri January 20, 2012

For Moroccan Activists, The King's Reforms Fall Short

Credit Azzouz Boukallouch / AP
Morocco's King Mohammed VI introduced reforms after protests began last February. But activists say the measures didn't go far enough and they are still taking to the streets. Here, the king is shown in his palace in Rabat last June 17.
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When a pro-democracy movement took to the streets of Morocco last February, King Mohammed VI, who's been on the throne for more than decade, responded swiftly.

Within weeks, the king proposed a new constitution and snap elections. The Moroccan example of reforms without violence was hailed by some as a model.

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The Arab Spring: One Year Later
12:01 am
Mon January 9, 2012

Is The Arab Spring Good Or Bad For The U.S.?

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The Arab uprisings have ousted or weakened or weakened some American allies. Elections in Tunisia and Egypt have shown the strength of Islamist political parties. And after the long, hard war in Iraq, the U.S. appears to have a diminished appetite for new, complicated undertakings in the region. In the last of our six-part series on the upheavals changing the Middle East, NPR's Deborah Amos looks at what it all means for America.

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Africa
2:51 pm
Fri January 6, 2012

Rapper's Imprisonment Tests Moroccan Reforms

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Credit Deborah Amos / NPR
Moroccan rapper Mouad Belrhouat — commonly known as "El-Haqed," or "the sullen one" (shown here on an album cover) — has been jailed for four months and is awaiting trial in Casablanca. His supporters say his case shows the limits of recent, post-Arab Spring political reforms.
Credit Abdelhak Senna / AFP/Getty Images
Young protesters in Rabat, Morrocco, demand political and social changes along with Belrhouat's release, Sept. 11, 2011,
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Morocco has been called one of the winners of the Arab Spring. The country's young king, Mohammed VI, offered a new constitution and early elections, taking the steam out of the February 20th protest movement.

But the arrest and trial of an artist who writes provocative rap songs shows that the reforms have a long way to go.

The rap songs of 24-year-old Moaud Belrhouat are popular in Morocco, even more so after the four months he has spent in jail.

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Middle East
12:01 am
Wed January 4, 2012

Syrian Uprising Raises The Specter Of Sectarian War

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Credit SANA handout / EPA /Landov
Syria's embattled President Bashar Assad still has supporters, particularly among his fellow Alawites, a minority who believe they will suffer if Assad is ousted. Here, Assad supporters rally Tuesday in the capital, Damascus.
Credit Anonymous / AP
Syrian President Bashar Assad, shown meeting with U.S. Ambassador Robert Ford last January, blames the uprising in Syria on Islamic radicals.
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For the past 10 months, Syrians have taken to the streets in large numbers to oppose a repressive regime that has not hesitated to use force. The United Nations estimates more than 5,000 Syrians have died, and it is far from clear how the uprising will play out. President Bashar Assad's regime blames the revolt on Islamist militants and casts the uprising as a threat to Syria's minorities, including Assad's fellow Alawites and the country's Christians.

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Middle East
5:04 pm
Thu December 29, 2011

In Syria, Arab League Monitors Caught In Crossfire

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Middle East
5:07 pm
Fri December 16, 2011

Arab League Wavers On Sanctions Against Syria

Credit Khaled Elfiqi / EPA /Landov
Arab League Secretary General Nabil Al Arabi (far left) meets with foreign ministers of the Arab League in Cairo on Nov. 27. The group imposed tough sanctions against Syria at that meeting, but is now wavering when it comes to implementing them.
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The Arab League has a reputation of being long on rhetoric and short on action. That's why it was so surprising when Arab ministers approved an unprecedented package of sanctions against Syria at the end of November.

But the unity that produced that vote is falling apart, and a meeting in Cairo to set the terms of the sanctions was suspended indefinitely.

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