Ruth Sherlock
Ruth Sherlock is an International Correspondent with National Public Radio. She's based in Beirut and reports on Syria and other countries around the Middle East. She was previously the United States Editor for the Daily Telegraph, covering the 2016 US election. Before moving to the US in the spring of 2015, she was the Telegraph's Middle East correspondent.
Sherlock reported from almost every revolution and war of the Arab Spring. She lived in Libya for the duration of the conflict, reporting from opposition front lines. In late 2011 she travelled to Syria, going undercover in regime held areas to document the arrest and torture of antigovernment demonstrators. As the war began in earnest, she hired smugglers to cross into rebel held parts of Syria from Turkey and Lebanon. She also developed contacts on the regime side of the conflict, and was given rare access in government held areas.
Her Libya coverage won her the Young Journalist of the Year prize at British Press Awards. In 2014, she was shortlisted at the British Journalism Awards for her investigation into the Syrian regime's continued use of chemical weapons. She has twice been a finalist for the Gaby Rado Award with Amnesty International for reporting with a focus on human rights. With NPR, in 2020, her reporting for the Embedded podcast was shortlisted for the prestigious Livingston Award.
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The dictator's choice of voting location sent "a message telling the opposition that we are celebrating through your demise," one Syrian analyst tells NPR. The government said Thursday that Assad won. -
Parents on both sides had to find ways to protect their children. "Yes, the cease-fire has been enforced. But how are we going to deal with children traumatized by this?" asks a mother in Gaza. -
Yemenis who won the diversity visa lottery were stopped by the Trump administration's travel ban. Now they've had to start applying all over again. "Our lives have been destroyed," says one man. -
For a week and a half, Gazans have taken cover in their stairwells and other parts of the house, eating canned foods and hoping they can run out in time — if an airstrike warning comes. -
People in Gaza talk about what life is like as Israeli airstrikes continue, taking lives and degrading infrastructure.
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"This is an embarrassing time for Gulf countries," says political scientist Bessma Momani. "Ultimately, they gave Israel a normalization deal, but didn't really extract anything for the Palestinians." -
An activist for women driving recently released from Saudi prison was summoned back to security forces and told her conviction on terrorism charges was upheld. She remains under watch.
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Misinformation about the coronavirus has been catching on easily in Lebanon, where sectarian rivalries leave groups searching for answers that back their world view.
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Some of the country's last beaches spared from development are now carpeted in globs of tar from an oil spill in the Mediterranean, damaging beaches that are nesting grounds for endangered turtles. -
Lebanese volunteers are trying to save one of the country's favorite beaches and the nesting places it provides for endangered sea turtles after a February oil spill from an oil tanker.
