By RICK GLADSTONE
Anthony Shadid, center, with residents of Cairo last February.
Anthony
Shadid, a gifted foreign correspondent whose graceful dispatches for The New
York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and The Associated Press
covered nearly two decades of Middle East conflict and turmoil, died,
apparently of an asthma attack, on Thursday while on a reporting assignment in
Syria. Tyler Hicks, a Times photographer who was with Mr. Shadid, carried his
body across the border to Turkey.
Mr.
Shadid, 43, had been reporting inside Syria for a week, gathering information
on the Free Syrian Army and other armed elements of the resistance to the
government of President Bashar al-Assad, whose military forces have been
engaged in a harsh repression of the political opposition in a conflict that is
now nearly a year old.
The
Syrian government, which tightly controls foreign journalists’ activities in
the country, had not been informed of his assignment by The Times.
The
exact circumstances of Mr. Shadid’s death and his precise location inside Syria
when it happened were not immediately clear.
But
Mr. Hicks said that Mr. Shadid, who had asthma and had carried medication with
him, began to show symptoms as both of them were preparing to leave Syria on
Thursday, and the symptoms escalated into what became a fatal attack. Mr. Hicks
telephoned his editors at The Times, and a few hours later he was able to take
Mr. Shadid’s body into Turkey.
Jill
Abramson, the executive editor, informed the newspaper’s staff Thursday evening
in an e-mail. “Anthony died as he lived — determined to bear witness to the
transformation sweeping the Middle East and to testify to the suffering of
people caught between government oppression and opposition forces,” she wrote.
The
assignment in Syria, which Mr. Shadid arranged through a network of smugglers,
was fraught with dangers, not the least of which was discovery by the
pro-government authorities in Syria. The journey into the country required both
Mr. Shadid and Mr. Hicks to travel at night to a mountainous border area in
Turkey adjoining Syria’s Idlib Province, where the demarcation line is a
barbed-wire fence. Mr. Hicks said they squeezed through the fence’s lower
portion by pulling the wires apart, and guides on horseback met them on the
other side. It was on that first night, Mr. Hicks said, that Mr. Shadid
suffered an initial bout of asthma, apparently set off by an allergy to the
horses, but he recovered after resting.
On
the way out a week later, however, Mr. Shadid suffered a more severe attack —
again apparently set off by proximity to the horses of the guides, Mr. Hicks
said, as they were walking toward the border. Short of breath, Mr. Shadid
leaned against a rock with both hands.
“I
stood next to him and asked if he was O.K., and then he collapsed,” Mr. Hicks
said. “He was not conscious and his breathing was very faint and very shallow.”
After a few minutes, he said, “I could see he was no longer breathing.”
Mr.
Hicks said he administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation for 30 minutes but was
unable to revive Mr. Shadid.
The
death of Mr. Shadid, an American of Lebanese descent who had a wife and two
children, abruptly ended one of the most storied careers in modern American
journalism. Fluent in Arabic, with a gifted eye for detail and contextual
writing, Mr. Shadid captured dimensions of life in the Middle East that many
others failed to see. Those talents won him a Pulitzer Prize for international
reporting in 2004 for his coverage of the American invasion of Iraq and the
occupation that followed, and a second Pulitzer in 2010, also for his Iraq
reporting, both of them for The Washington Post. He also was a finalist in 2007
for his coverage of Lebanon, and has been nominated by The Times for his
coverage of the Arab Spring uprisings that have transfixed the Middle East for
the past year.
Mr.
Shadid began his Middle East reporting career as a correspondent for The A.P.
based in Cairo, traveling around the region from 1995 to 1999. He later worked
at The Boston Globe before moving to The Post, where he was the Islamic Affairs
correspondent and Baghdad bureau chief. He joined The Times at the end of 2009.
He
was no stranger to injury, harassment and arrest. In 2002, while working for
The Globe, he was shot and wounded in the shoulder as he walked on a street in
Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. During the tumultuous protests in
Cairo last year that led to the fall of President Hosni Mubarak, Mr. Shadid was
hounded by Mr. Mubarak’s police, and during a police raid, he had to hide the
computers used by Times reporters.
Mr.
Shadid, Mr. Hicks and two other Times journalists, Stephen Farrell and Lynsey
Addario, were arrested by pro-government militias during the conflict in Libya
last year and held for more than a week, during which all were physically
abused. Their driver, Mohammad Shaglouf, died.
In
the 2004 citation, the Pulitzer Board praised “his extraordinary ability to
capture, at personal peril, the voices and emotions of Iraqis as their country
was invaded, their leader toppled and their way of life upended.” In the 2010
citation, the board praised “his rich, beautifully written series on Iraq as
the United States departs and its people and leaders struggle to deal with the
legacy of war and to shape the nation’s future.”
He
spoke of the risks he took while reporting in an interview in December with
Terry Gross on the NPR program “Fresh Air.”
“I did feel that Syria was so important, and that story wouldn’t be told
otherwise, that it was worth taking risks for,” he said of an earlier trip to
Syria in which he entered the country from Lebanon on a motorcycle across a
rugged stretch of land.
Mr.
Shadid was not afraid to butt heads with his editors to protect a phrase, scene
or quotation that he considered essential to making his point.
His
final article for The Times, which ran on Feb. 9, was a behind-the-scenes look
at the tumultuous situation in Libya, where rival militias had replaced the
government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. It ran long, at more than 1,600 words,
which was typical of Mr. Shadid’s work. It was splashed on the front page of
the newspaper and the home page of the Web site, nytimes.com, which was also
typical.
Mr.
Shadid also had a penchant for elegiac prose. In the opening of a new book,
“House of Stone,” to be published next month, he described what he had
witnessed in Lebanon after Israeli air assaults in the summer of 2006:
“Some
suffering cannot be covered in words,” he wrote. “This had become my daily fare
as reporter in the Middle East documenting war, its survivors and fatalities,
and the many who seem a little of both. In the Lebanese town of Qana, where
Israeli bombs caught their victims in the midst of a morning’s work, we saw the
dead standing, sitting, looking around. The village, its voices and stories, plates
and bowls, letters and words, its history, had been obliterated in a few
extended moments that splintered a quiet morning.”
-This story was published in The New York Times on 17/02/2012
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