There are people who are so gifted that they are beyond envy. That was the case with Anthony Shadid, who died tragically yesterday, of a severe asthma attack, at the end of an arduous and dangerous assignment behind rebel lines inside Syria.
I first met Anthony in Baghdad in 2003, during the three-week American bombardment that drove Saddam from power. He was among the reporters who had stayed behind to cover the collapse of the regime. He was warm but quiet, and always busy, working around the clock under the tense circumstances of those days. When I saw his stories—he was then reporting for the Washington Post—it was instantly obvious that he was someone special. He spoke Arabic, and so was able to hear dialogue and pick up nuances that were beyond the ken of most Western reporters. But it was more than that; he was a gifted analyst and prose stylist. It was a rare combination of talents, and Anthony was recognized for it, winning the first of his well-deserved two Pulitzers for his reporting that year. And he was the father of two children and a husband to Nada Bakri, his fellow Middle East correspondent for the Times.
Over the years, I caught up with Anthony several times in the midst of reporting. He had an adventurous spirit, and loved nothing more than getting out and mixing it up along with the front-line photographers and the fighters, too. That is mostly where I saw him, in Lebanon, during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, and again last year with the rebels in eastern Libya. No matter the circumstances, he always made time to talk. I was struck by his warmth, humor, obvious sincerity, and his openness to discussing stories—things he was seeing and hearing, what he was working on, and wanting to know what you thought, too. There was never any sense of a “side” to him, nor the selfishness that dogs so many in our profession, especially when in the field and having to compete for stories.
Last year, bumping into one another for the first time in a long while on the Libyan front line, with Qaddafi’s planes bombing and rockets coming in and craziness all around us, Anthony expressed his disquiet at the risk that forces of violent extremism were being unleashed in Libya and elsewhere. But he seemed thrilled and privileged to be there in the midst of all the action and the history, and anxious to understand and document everything he saw. A couple of days later, just before he and three Times colleagues—one was Tyler Hicks, who was with him in Syria yesterday and carried his body over the border—were captured by Qaddafi forces and held for a harrowing week, I shared a house with Anthony and his friends in the front-line oil town of Brega. One evening, I recall, as we sat writing in the same room, he looked up and remarked—and I am paraphrasing here from memory—“What an amazing time to be alive, and doing what we’re doing. Isn’t it?”
Read remembrances of Anthony Shadid by Steve Coll, George Packer, and Dexter Filkins.
Photograph by Ed Ou/The New York Times.
