Deborah Amos
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.
In 2009, Amos won the Edward Weintal Prize for Diplomatic Reporting from Georgetown University and in 2010 was awarded the Edward R. Murrow Lifetime Achievement Award by Washington State University. Amos was part of a team of reporters who won a 2004 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for coverage of Iraq. A Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1991-1992, Amos 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 a duPont-Columbia Award and a Breakthru 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 is a Ferris Professor at Princeton, where she teaches journalism during the fall term.
Amos began her career after receiving a degree in broadcasting from the University of Florida at Gainesville.
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As Islamic State militants have marched across Syria and Iraq, oil smuggling has been a major part of their strategy. They have targeted oil fields and refineries and worked with a range of middlemen. -
Syrians have flooded into neighboring countries, and now they are having babies. But the children are not receiving citizenship from either Syria or the country where they are born. -
Rebels captured the eastern half of Aleppo, the country's biggest city, two years ago. Now President Assad's army looks likely to drive them out in what would be a major blow to the opposition. -
Against the demands of the Assad regime, a covert cross-border operation has been getting aid to desperate Syrians in areas out of government control. A new U.N. resolution could expand these efforts. -
After sweeping military victories, the group now known as the Islamic State is demanding loyalty from all Muslims. Like other radical Islamist groups, they may be alienating potential supporters. -
Sunni militants were originally welcomed when they rolled into the Iraqi city of Mosul, but now there's a power struggle between the local tribes, Sunnis and Saddam Hussein's former Baathist party.
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Archbishop Emil Nona, the head of the Chaldean church in Mosul, Iraq, was out of town when ISIS captured his city. Now, he is going back to Mosul, as are some 50 Christian families. He knows the dangers, but he says he must tend his flock.
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As the Iraqi army crumbled before militants this month, the nation's ethnic Kurds are taking back long-sought areas and revisiting the dream of declaring themselves an independent state. -
Both ISIS militants and the Iraqi government claim to control the country's largest oil refinery. But NPR's Deborah Amos reports that the rebels have closed in and are negotiating with the beleaguered forces inside.
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Not all Sunnis are on board with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, even if they oppose the Iraqi government. One ranking Sunni cleric in northern Iraq hints at limits to the group's influence.
