Leila Fadel

Activists say militants are holding hundreds, perhaps thousands of Yazidi women in northern Iraq. The women make contact through secret phones; some men have been killed or beaten trying to save them.

In English, the 22-year-old woman's name means life. She's afraid to let us use it for the safety of the hostages that ISIS still holds. She was taken with thousands of other women and children, but she escaped, and now they're searching for her. Her nickname is Dudu.

We meet ...

Residents of Mosul say they want more airstrikes against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, inside the Iraqi city — not just on the outskirts.

It's an "I told you so" moment for Egyptian leaders, who have been trying to get the world on board with their crackdown on their opponents in the Muslim Brotherhood.

NBA Hawks owner Bruce Levenson's decision to quit this week over a racially offensive email has reopened a conversation about the racial divide among fans in sports. Audie Cornish tal...

Egypt's Ministry of Social Solidarity is threatening to prosecute nongovernmental organizations that are not compliant with an oppressive law that allows the government to fully contr...

Libya keeps spiraling downward as Islamist fighters slug it out with forces loyal to a rogue general in the capital and elsewhere.

Conditions in Libya have gone from bad to worse in recent months, with its main airport now a battleground and foreigners pulling out of the country.

Human rights groups are accusing the Iraqi government of indiscriminate bombing. Baghdad officials deny that and note they're fighting a Sunni insurgency that commits mass executions and suicide bombings.

Yet rights workers say civilians are being killed by government attacks with so-called barrel bombs — the crude weapons made famous ...

North Korea has fired a short-range ballistic missile into the Sea of Japan, according to The Associated Press, which quotes an unnamed South Korean official.

The test is described as beginning with a launch in the country's southwest Hwanghae province on Saturday morning and ending when the missile landed off ...

The radical Islamic State and former associates of Saddam Hussein have fought together against Iraq's government. But the fault lines between the unlikely partners are beginning to show.

The Sunni extremist group that calls itself the Islamic State is solidifying its hold on the Iraqi city of Mosul. As it does so, the group is building a track record for how it actual...

For the first time since the first century, there are basically no Christians left in the historic Iraqi city of Mosul.

A small Sunni Arab town north of Baghdad put up a fight when Sunni Muslim extremists from the so-called Islamic State tried to impose their rule on the town.

The residents lost, and now the town, Zowiya, just outside of Tikrit, is destroyed. More than 200 of its homes have ...

Iraq chose a new speaker of its parliament today — a small step that the U.S. has been urging it to take toward ending the crisis there. But many say it's far from the overhaul that's needed.

Egypt's government has slashed subsidies on fuel. While economists say the subsidy decrease is necessary to address the deficit, already-suffering middle class and poor Egyptians are furious.

The beach bums of Tripoli say that no matter who's in charge of Libya, they'll still be at the beach. NPR's Leila Fadel sends this postcard from Tripoli.

No one is safe in Libya these days. Judges, activists, human rights defenders and former officers in Moammar's Gadhafi's army are being silenced with bullets and knives.

There are no formal security forces, weapons remain unsecured and the economy is foundering because rebels seized oil ports in the east.

For ...