Arwa Damon

Early life

Damon was born in Boston to an American father and a Syrian Kurdish mother. At age six she moved to Morocco, then to Istanbul three years later, where her father taught at Robert College. She skipped sixth grade, graduated with honors from Robert College at 16, spent a gap year in Morocco learning show jumping, and earned a degree from Skidmore College in 1999 with a major in French and a minor in international affairs. Before journalism, she sold bathrobes and towels for an online textile company.

Journalism career

Damon decided to become a journalist after 9/11 and moved to Baghdad before the Iraq War. She began at CameraPlanet, then freelanced at CNN's Baghdad bureau in 2004, joining CNN as a correspondent in 2006. She covered the Iraqi elections of January 2005, the October 2005 constitutional referendum, and the December 2005 election, as well as the trials and executions of Saddam Hussein, Barzan Ibrahim Hassan al-Tikriti, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar in January 2007.

During the Syrian civil war she traveled multiple times to Syria and refugee camps. After the 2012 Benghazi attack, she was among the first journalists on scene and recovered slain Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens' personal diary. In 2013 she followed an anti-poaching ranger unit in Odzala National Park for the feature Arwa Damon Investigates: Ivory War. In April 2014, after the Chibok schoolgirls kidnapping, she traveled to West Africa and Lake Chad islands.

She covered the international military intervention against ISIL from its start, returned to Iraq in late 2016 for the Battle of Mosul, where she came under heavy fire and was trapped for 28 hours before rescue. She reported on the Tham Luang cave rescue in Thailand, accompanied a Greenpeace group to Antarctica in 2018, traveled to Kathmandu in 2019 to report on Everest climber fatalities, and that year went with Greenpeace to the Arctic to report on ice loss. She announced her departure from CNN in June 2022.

Did You Know?

• Damon is fluent in Arabic, French and Turkish and lives in Istanbul with three pet cats.
• During the Gaza war, Damon entered the Gaza Strip four times to lead charity work.