Arwa Damon

Arwa Damon (born September 19, 1977) is a Syrian American journalist who was most recently a senior international correspondent for CNN, based in Istanbul. From 2003, she covered the Middle East as a freelance journalist, before joining CNN in 2006. She is also president and founder of INARA, a humanitarian organization that provides medical treatment to refugee children from Syria. She left CNN in June 2022 to focus on her humanitarian work. to an American father and Syrian Kurdish mother. She spent her early childhood years in Wayland, Massachusetts. Damon is the granddaughter of Muhsin al-Barazi, the former Prime Minister of Syria, who was executed in the August 1949 Syrian coup d'état.

At the age of six, Damon and her family moved to Morocco, followed by Istanbul, Turkey three years later,

Damon skipped sixth grade and graduated with honors from Robert College at the age of 16. She then spent a gap year with her aunt and uncle in Morocco, learning show jumping, before moving to the U.S. to attend Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Before becoming a reporter, Damon sold bathrobes and towels for an online textile company. She began her career at CameraPlanet, a supplier of media content for television newscasts.

CNN/CNN International Damon covered the Iraqi elections of January 2005, the constitutional referendum vote in October 2005, and the Iraqi election of December 2005. She also reported on the trials and executions of Saddam Hussein, Barzan Ibrahim Hassan al-Tikriti and Awad Hamed al-Bandar in January 2007.

In April 2014, after the Chibok schoolgirls kidnapping, she travelled to West Africa and the islands of Lake Chad to follow the hunt for the terrorists.

In 2019, Damon travelled to Kathmandu in Nepal to report on a spike in fatalities amongst Mount Everest climbers. That year, she traveled again with Greenpeace, this time to the Arctic. She reported about the significant loss of ice at the poles and their importance for the whole ecosystem of the earth.

She announced her departure from CNN in June 2022 to focus on her humanitarian work.

Charitable work INARA (the International Network for Aid, Relief and Assistance) is a humanitarian aid, 501(c)(3), non-profit organization that was co-founded by Arwa Damon in 2015 in Beirut, Lebanon. INARA provides medical services for children who have been wounded in war zones. It also provides rehabilitation treatment for its beneficiaries. The organization focuses on refugee children from Syria.

During the Gaza war, Damon entered the Gaza Strip four times to lead charity work.

Awards and honors Damon won an Investigative Reporters and Editors' IRE Award for her reporting of the Consulate attack in Benghazi, along with fellow photojournalist Sarmad Qaseera. In 2014, she was awarded the Courage in Journalism Award given by the International Women's Media Foundation (IWMF).