Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson
Special correspondent Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson is based in Berlin. Her reports can be heard on NPR's award-winning programs, including Morning Edition and All Things Considered, and read at NPR.org. From 2012 until 2018 Nelson was NPR's bureau chief in Berlin. She won the ICFJ 2017 Excellence in International Reporting Award for her work in Central and Eastern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Afghanistan.
Nelson was also based in Cairo for NPR and covered the Arab World from the Middle East to North Africa during the Arab Spring. In 2006, Nelson opened NPR's first bureau in Kabul, from where she provided listeners in an in-depth sense of life inside Afghanistan, from the increase in suicide among women in a country that treats them as second class citizens to the growing interference of Iran and Pakistan in Afghan affairs. For her coverage of Afghanistan, she won a Peabody Award, Overseas Press Club Award, and the Gracie in 2010. She received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award from Colby College in 2011 for her coverage in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
Nelson spent 20 years as newspaper reporter, including as Knight Ridder's Middle East Bureau Chief. While at the Los Angeles Times, she was sent on extended assignment to Iran and Afghanistan following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. She spent three years an editor and reporter for Newsday and was part of the team that won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for covering the crash of TWA Flight 800.
A graduate of the University of Maryland, Nelson speaks Farsi, Dari and German.
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City planners rushed to erase divisions between East and West Berlin after the wall came down in 1989. But the fate of communist-era buildings can still provoke friction a quarter-century later. -
The country's defense minister says Germany currently can't fulfill its long-term NATO commitments because of a widespread grounding of its military planes and helicopters. -
The nation is the world's third-largest arms exporter, and many weapons go to countries with questionable human rights records. Sigmar Gabriel wants to change that — but not all Germans are on board. -
At an event in Berlin, Chancellor Angela Merkel said there is no place for anti-Semitism in Germany and called it a "monstrous scandal" that anyone in the country would be hassled for being Jewish. -
In Ukraine, civilian volunteers are digging trenches outside the port city of Mariupol in an effort to defend their city from assault by separatist forces.
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Ukraine has accused Russia of trying to open a new front in the war between the government and pro-Moscow separatists in eastern Ukraine.
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Russia has sent a large number of trucks into eastern Ukraine without the authorization of the Ukrainian government or Red Cross supervision. Moscow says the trucks are carrying aid for civilians, but the Ukrainians — together with NATO, U.S. and European leaders — say the move is a violation of Ukrainian sovereignty.
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There are reports of heavy shelling on the outskirts of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, as government forces try to take the city from pro-Russian separatists. Meanwhile, thousands of the city's residents are trying to flee the fighting.
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The Ukrainian military says it has retrieved over a dozen bodies of people killed in an alleged attack on civilian vehicles on Monday. The government says separatists attacked the cars and trucks on a road outside of the city of Luhansk, but the rebels deny this.
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Both Ukraine and Russia say they're trying to send supplies to residents in eastern Ukraine. But with tensions on both sides running high, that aid may take a while to arrive.
