Obituary: Anthony Shadid / Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter on the Middle East
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Anthony Shadid takes notes outside Ayatollah Sistani's office Dec. 3, 2003, in Najaf, south of Baghdad. Mr. Shadid, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who strove to capture untold stories in Middle East conflicts from Libya to Iraq, died Thursday in eastern Syria.
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Anthony Shadid, one of the most incisive and honored foreign correspondents of his generation, died Thursday in Syria, where he was covering the armed insurrection against the government for his newspaper, the New York Times.
Mr. Shadid, 43, won two Pulitzer Prizes for his lyrical and poignant dispatches from Iraq, which he covered extensively for The Washington Post before and after the U.S. invasion in 2003. Mr. Shadid, a fluent Arabic speaker, roamed broadly across the Arabic world, reporting with precision, nuance and depth from the West Bank, Lebanon, Libya and other troubled and peaceful realms in the region.
The apparent cause of death was an asthma attack -- an ironic end for a man who placed himself in the path of danger countless times. Mr. Shadid was shot in the shoulder while in the West Bank city of Ramallah on Easter 2002. He and several of his New York Times colleagues were arrested, detained and treated roughly by forces loyal to Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi last year.
"He changed the way we saw Iraq, Egypt, Syria over the last, crucial decade," said Phil Bennett, the former managing editor of the Washington Post who worked closely with Mr. Shadid. "There is no one to replace him."
The Times said Mr. Shadid had been reporting in Syria for a week on rebels battling the regime of Bashar Assad. Tyler Hicks, a Times photographer who was accompanying Mr. Shadid, said the reporter had asthma and carried medication with him. Mr. Shadid began to exhibit symptoms early Thursday, and they escalated into what became a fatal attack, according to Mr. Hicks's account, as recounted by the Times.
The two men had entered the country last week in defiance of a Syrian ban on Western reporters, sneaking in at night under a barbed-wire fence, according to the Times. They were met by guides on horseback, and Mr. Shadid apparently had an adverse reaction to the horses. A week later, as they made their way out, he reacted to the horses again. Mr. Hicks attempted to revive his colleague with CPR and then carried him across the border into Turkey, the newspaper said.
First Published February 18, 2012 12:00 am
