Bilal Abdul Kareem
American journalist
Bilal Abdul Kareem (born Darrell Lamont Phelps) is an American journalist and war correspondent covering the Syrian civil war who has worked with CNN. He believes that he has been placed on the US kill list.
He claims to have survived five drone assassination attempts by the US military, which killed random civilians that were present nearby, including two attacks on vehicles he was traveling in, and including one where the car he was sitting in was blown up by a missile shot from a drone.
He has been criticized by some observers for a perceived alignment with jihadi fighters in Syria, with The New York Times reporting that Kareem was considered a "jihadist propagandist" to some.
On August 13, 2020, it was reported that Abdul Kareem had been arrested by Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham in Atme, northern Idlib. After six months of detention, he was freed on February 17, 2021. He is married with 3 wives and has 11 children.
General Security Service arrested Abdul Kareem in al-Fath Mosque, al-Bab on 22 December 2025.
Early life and career
Abdul Kareem, born Darrell Lamont Phelps, grew up in Mount Vernon, New York; he attended Mount Vernon High School, then studied creative writing at Purchase College SUNY, before going on to work in stand-up comedy. He converted to Islam, partly due to its "emphasis on clean living", travelled to Egypt to study Arabic, where he later obtained a presenting role with Saudi-funded television channel, Huda TV. After leaving Huda TV due to "disagreements", he travelled to Rwanda and Libya to film documentaries, before arriving in Syria in 2012 where he was first hosted by Ahrar al-Sham. He filmed Khadijah Dare and her husband and son in 2013, talking about their lives as a jihadist family, and the footage was broadcast on Channel 4.
“Bilal Abdul Kareem” enters the record as american journalist. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bilal, Abdul and Kareem can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q55759729. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2020, 2021, 2025 and 2012.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bilal Abdul Kareem” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.