Her Life
A daughter of two worlds
Serena Ali Shim was born in Michigan on October 10, 1985, to a Lebanese family, and grew up carrying Detroit and Beirut inside her at once. She became a journalist at twenty-one, a mother of two, and a correspondent who kept going toward the stories others were leaving. She was twenty-nine when she was killed.
Detroit
She was raised in the Detroit suburbs of Dearborn and Livonia, the daughter of Judith Poe and Ali Shim, a Lebanese immigrant from Bourj el-Barajneh in south Beirut. She graduated from Clarenceville High School in Livonia.
Years later, introducing herself in Beirut — in what a colleague remembered as a thick Detroit accent — she would say simply: “I come from the Burj.”
Beirut
Around eighteen, after high school and her parents' divorce, she moved to Lebanon and settled in her father's hometown of Bourj el-Barajneh, enrolling at university in Beirut. She spoke fluent Arabic alongside her native English — a fluency that would later carry her reporting places most Western correspondents could not go.
In 2007, while still an undergraduate, she was hired by the English-language broadcaster Press TV — first as a news show host, then as a correspondent out of the Beirut bureau.
The work
Her career ran through the region's hardest years: the Syrian uprising from 2011, months of undercover reporting along the Turkey–Syria border in 2012, Turkey's Gezi Park protests in 2013, the Iraqi parliamentary elections and the war in Ukraine in 2014.
In 2012 she documented what she said were transfers of weapons and militants into Syria through border crossings like Bab al-Hawa — reporting she returned to in her final assignment. Of that border she once said: “I go to do reports at the Bab al-Hawa border crossing, and I don't have to ask Turkish security for permission — I have to ask the militants for permission.”
Wife and mother
She was married to Ibrahim Shim, and was the family's breadwinner while her husband raised their two children — a son, Ali, and a daughter, aged four and two when she died.
In her last weeks she had been quietly planning to move the family back to Michigan. In a voice message to her mother she said: “This is my last trip and I'm done. Because, after that, there's nothing else that I can do — and I want to go out with a bang.”
The last assignment
In October 2014 she texted her mother: “I feel like I need to go to the Turkey-Syria border ASAP. I have to cover the conflict there.” She went to Suruç to cover the Islamic State siege of Kobani, just across the border.
On October 17 she said live on air that Turkish intelligence had accused her of spying, and that she was frightened of what might be used against her. On October 19, returning toward her hotel, the car she was riding in collided with a heavy truck. She did not survive. The full account of those days — what is established, what is claimed, and what has never been answered — is kept on the Justice page.
She was buried on October 22, 2014, in the Bourj el-Barajneh cemetery in Beirut. Hundreds came. Her father said at the funeral: “We are proud of her, she was born to be a hero and remained a hero until the end, working on the frontline.”
What remains
Her press cards, passport, driving permit and tablet are displayed at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. In 2019, the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism was established in her honor.
Her sister Fatmeh said of her: “If everybody was going left, she would go right.” Her mother remembers her sense of humor, her gratitude — and that she gave her life for the truth.