Sylvia Poggioli is senior European correspondent for NPR's International Desk covering political, economic, and cultural news in Italy, the Vatican, Western Europe, and the Balkans. Poggioli's on-air reporting and analysis have encompassed the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the turbulent civil war in the former Yugoslavia, and how immigration has transformed European societies.
Comments by Secretary of State Antony Blinken this weekend were the first time a U.S. official has acknowledged contact with the Syrian rebel group that drove Bashar al-Assad from power.