The New York Times Pulitzer Prize-Winner, Anthony Shadid, Has Died in Syria

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2012/02/201221735422828748.html

Al Jazeera...

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New York Times reporter dies in Syria

Veteran correspondent Anthony Shadid apparently died following asthma attack while on assignment, according to paper.

Last Modified: 17 Feb 2012 06:37

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Award-winning journalist Anthony Shadid has died while on a reporting assignment to Syria, his employer The New York Times says.

The exact circumstances for his death were not clear, but the paper said he apparently died of an asthma attack on Thursday.

The Times said its photographer Tyler Hicks, who was with Shadid, had carried his body across the border to Turkey.

"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," the paper said.

The two entered the country illegally from Turkey. Hicks said the deadly asthma attack was set off by his allergy to horses, as the two were assisted by "guides on horseback" as they were walking towards the border.

Shadid, an American of Lebanese descent, covered the Middle East extensively, for outlets including The Washington Post and The Associated Press.

He won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize twice for his Iraq reporting and several other awards.

In March last year, Shadid and two other Times journalists were held for a week by pro-government fighters in Libya after going there to report on the revolt against former leader Muammar Gaddafi.

"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," Jill Abramson, the executive editor of the Times, wrote in an email to staff.

Shadid was 43 and is survived by his wife and two children.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/colleagues-recall-shadid-as-extra...

The Washington Post...

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Colleagues recall Shadid as extraordinary reporter, kind friend

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PART ONE...

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Published: February 16 | Updated: Friday, February 17, 12:04 AM

Here are some reactions from colleagues to the death of Anthony Shadid, the Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent who brought the Middle East alive on the pages of the Boston Globe, Washington Post and New York Times. Shadid died in Syria while reporting for the New York Times.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Washington Post senior correspondent and associate editor

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In the summer of 2003, when the rest of the press corps in Baghdad fixated upon the lives of American soldiers in the desert and the nascent efforts to rebuild Iraq’s government, Anthony Shadid jumped in a white Chevy Caprice and headed south, to the Shiite holy city of Najaf.

He spent days on end in Najaf’s labyrinthine alleys, gazing into seminaries and seeking out the most influential religious leaders of Iraq’s newly empowered majority sect. He grasped long before any other journalist, and well before the American officials cloistered in the Green Zone, that the new center of power in Iraq rested with the grand ayatollahs of Shiite Islam. He called them the men with “ten-gallon turbans,” and he wrote the most vivid, insightful pieces about them, usually composed on deadline — on a Saturday afternoon for the Sunday Washington Post — fueled by two packs of Marlboro lights.

He banged out lines like this: “Ahead of him was the future of a country where Sadr's followers are seeking to turn his legacy into power and, en route, discover the elusive intersection of religion and politics that has bedeviled the Muslim world for a generation.”

It was vintage Shadid. Eloquent and prescient. Graceful and gripping.

His death on Thursday, from an apparent asthma attack while on a reporting trip in Syria, has deprived American journalism of its most gifted foreign correspondent in a generation. His coverage of the Middle East — from Iraq, Lebanon, Libya and beyond — was, simply, the best. He set the standard. If you cared about the region, if you really wanted to understand what was going on, you read Anthony.

His colleagues got it. He won two Pulitzers in a six-year span. His first, in 2004, was a result, according to the Pulitzer board, of “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.”

He found humanity amid the rubble, compassion in the tableau of violence. He wrote about war by focusing on people, with intimate detail, revealing their lives in elegiac prose.

Anthony never let the plaudits get to his head. He could have had his choice of cushy assignments in Europe or the United States. He could have become a successful commentator or analyst. But his heart was in the Middle East — and in the story. He kept going out to report — to talk to people, to observe, to understand. Sometimes it involved great personal peril — he stayed in Baghdad through the shock-and-awe bombing campaign, he traveled through southern Lebanon during the 2006 war and Israeli invasion, and he was kidnapped in Libya with three other New York Times journalists — but he was no adrenaline junkie. He did it because he wanted to know what was really happening. And that couldn’t be gleaned from a distance. During the U.S. invasion of Baghdad, when other journalists tried to figure out what was going on from their hotel rooms, Anthony sneaked onto the streets and talked to Iraqis. His dispatches were an order of magnitude more illuminating.

His knowledge of Arabic also put him ahead of the pack. Everyone assumed he picked it up as a child, as the son of second-generation Lebanese Americans. But English was the language of his home in Oklahoma. He learned Arabic the hard way: in an immersion program in Cairo, after he had graduated from college.

His fluency meant he could converse with the Iraqis who worked for The Post in ways that no other American staffer could. He befriended them and their families — and they loved him back. When they needed money — for a sick relative, to replace a broken car — Anthony never hesitated. He opened his wallet and fished out a handful of bills. And he never sent an Iraqi colleague to places he wouldn’t travel himself.

He displayed the same open heart with his fellow Americans. He shared his sources and his knowledge. When it was his turn to write the news-of-the-day story — we rotated that thankless assignment in the Baghdad bureau — he launched into it with zeal. Instead of swallowing spoon-fed information from military spokesmen, he summoned Karim, his trusty chauffeur, and they headed off in the Caprice in search of eyewitnesses. If that meant a dicey drive into Fallujah, so be it. He wanted the ground truth.

Once, on a trip to Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, he purchased a video disc from a tea shop. Unlike Starbucks, which once sold music intended to relax the listener, the offering in Tikrit was titled “Anger.” It was a compilation of bloody images of U.S. and insurgent attacks that was sickening to watch. Anthony bought it not because of its shock value, but because he knew he needed to see it to understand how Iraqi public opinion was being shaped.

What made him so unique was his gift with both languages. He could speak to the Iraqis like a native, and he could pen his stories like few others in American journalism. I’ll never forget the May 2003 story where he introduced us to Karima, a mother in Baghdad struggling to survive:

“Along Karrada Street, which runs through a spit of land along a bend in the Tigris River, Panasonic televisions, Samsung washing machines, Toshiba refrigerators and a gaggle of air conditioners, ovens and satellite dishes spill into the streets — courtesy of an Iraqi dinar buoyed by a deluge of U.S. dollars and the overnight disappearance of once-steep customs duties and taxes,” Shadid wrote in a front-page Post story. “Overlooking the display is a three-room apartment, where Karima and her family of eight live in envy. ‘From the war until now, I've earned nothing,’ she said dolefully, a black veil framing a wizened face that belies her 36 years.”

Then there was the piece he co-wrote with Tom Ricks. It was, I am certain, one of the single best stories that ever was filed from Iraq.

Tom accompanied a U.S. Army patrol in Baghdad that believed it was befriending the locals. A soldier Ricks quoted deemed the neighborhood “95 percent friendly.” Anthony followed along and talked to the same Iraqis who had spoken to the troops. He heard deep suspicion and anger. “We refuse the occupation — not 100 percent, but 1,000 percent,” one man told Shadid. Once again, Anthony was ahead of the pack.

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CONTINUED...

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/anthony-shadid-dies-in-syria-r...

The Washington Post...

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Posted at 10:12 PM ET, 02/16/2012
Anthony Shadid dies in Syria: read his legacy of award-winning work

By Melissa Bell

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Anthony Shadid, a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent, died at the age of 43 in Syria, while reporting for the New York Times. A beloved and brilliant writer, Shadid spent his two-decade career reporting for the Boston Globe, the Times and The Washington Post in the Middle East. He was also the author of three books, including “House of Stone,”due out this March.
Anthony Shadid (Sue Ogrocki/AP)

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The New York Times reported Shadid’s death Thursday evening, writing that he apparently succumbed to a severe asthma attack. A Times photographer, Tyler Hicks, managed to carry Shadid’s body from Syria into Turkey.

Shadid’s death came just hours after the United Nations overwhelmingly voted for a resolution condemning the violent crackdown by the government of Syria. The Times said Shadid was in the country working to gather information on the opposition forces and that the Syrian government had not been informed of Shadid’s entry into the country.

Shadid did not shy away from danger, even after being shot in the shoulder in 2002 in Ramallah, while working for the Globe. He was also one of four New York Times reporters arrested in Libya last March.

Steve Fainaru, a former Post reporter who worked extensively with Shadid in Iraq, recalled him as “the best journalist I’d ever seen — without any question.”

“He was the best reporter, his attention to detail was amazing, he wrote poetry on deadline. He’s just completely unflappable. But all I can think of is him as a person. He was one of the kindest, most compassionate, most empathetic people I ever met. He’s such a great friend. And that’s what made him so great as a journalist—he was able to somehow find compassion and empathy in everything he touched and wrote about.”

Fainaru recalled being in Kirkuk in northern Iraq with Shadid, and asking the reporter if he thought it was safe to move around. “His response was, I don’t know. And then he was gone. He was off reporting ... He was not, in my mind, an adrenaline junkie. He took the risks grudgingly, because that’s where the story was.”

Shadid was married to New York Times reporter Nada Bakri, and had two children.

Shadid won two Pulitzers for coverage of Iraq while reporting for The Post. In 2010, for his second prize, the Pulitzer board wrote they awarded Shadid “for 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.”

Read below the work submitted for Shadid’s 2010 Pulitzer Prize:

In Iraq, the Day After (Jan. 2, 2009)

New Paths to Power Emerge in Iraq (Jan. 13, 2009)

‘No One Values the Victims Anymore’ (March 12, 2009)

A Journey Into the Iraq of Recollection (April 1, 2009)

A Quiet but Undeniable Cultural Legacy (May 31, 2009)

Worries About A Kurdish-Arab Conflict Move To Fore in Iraq (July 27, 2009)

In Anbar, U.S.-Allied Tribal Chiefs Feel Deep Sense of Abandonment (October 3, 2009)

‘People woke up, and they were gone’ (Dec. 4, 2009)

2003 U.S. raid in Iraqi town serves as a cautionary tale (Dec. 24, 2009)

In 2004, the Pulitzer board cited Shadid for “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 New Iraq, Sunnis Fear a Grim Future

In Revival Of Najaf, Lessons for A New Iraq

For an Iraqi Family, ‘No Other Choice’

Attackers United By Piety in Plot To Strike Troops

Shiite Clerics Face a Time Of Opportunity and Risks

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/correspondent-anthony-shadid-43-d...

The Washington Post...

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Correspondent Anthony Shadid, 43, dies in Syria

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By Paul Farhi and Mary Beth Sheridan, Published: February 16

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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.

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.-led invasion in 2003. Shadid, a fluent Arabic speaker, roamed broadly across the Arab 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. Shadid was shot in the shoulder while in the West Bank city of Ramallah on Easter Sunday in 2002; he and several of his New York Times colleagues were arrested, detained and treated roughly by forces loyal to Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi 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 Post who worked closely with Shadid. “There is no one to replace him.”

The Times said Shadid had been reporting in Syria for a week on rebels battling the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Tyler Hicks, a Times photographer who was accompanying Shadid, said the reporter had asthma and carried medication with him. Shadid began to exhibit symptoms early Thursday, and they escalated into what became a fatal attack, according to Hicks’s account, as quoted 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 barbed wire, according to the Times. They were met by guides on horseback, and Shadid apparently had an adverse reaction to the horses. A week later, as they made their way out, he reacted to the horses again. “I stood next to him and asked if he was okay, and then he collapsed,” Hicks said. Hicks attempted to revive his colleague and then carried him across the border into Turkey, the newspaper said.

The news of Shadid’s death sent shock waves through newsrooms in New York, Boston and Washington, where journalists who had worked with Shadid at those cities’ three leading newspapers recalled a colleague of deep intellect, enormous generosity and a well-tuned, ironic sense of humor. During the U.S. “shock and awe” bombing campaign in the early days of the Iraq conflict, for example, Shadid quoted an American-educated Iraqi this way: “To tell you the truth, I’ve been neither shocked nor awed.”

Marty Baron, editor of the Boston Globe, for which Shadid worked before joining The Post in 2003, recalled rushing to Israel in 2002 after Shadid, then a Globe reporter, was shot while covering demonstrations on the West Bank.

“It was amazing, seeing him in the hospital. Here was a person that, despite what happened to him, was still remarkably positive about things, demonstrated a real eagerness to get out of the hospital, get back in the field,” said Baron. “It was clear his wounds were not going to stop him, even though it looked like he was going to have severely limited mobility in at least one of his shoulders. He was amazingly resilient. He had such a love for the story of the region, and a passion for telling that story.”

Shadid, who lived in Beirut, had a daughter, Laila, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce. He had a son, Malik, from his second marriage, to Times reporter Nada Bakri.

In breaking the news to his staff, Washington Post editor Marcus Brauchli called Shadid “a brilliant correspondent, and a loyal and stalwart friend to many.” Shadid joined the Times in 2010.

Steve Fainaru, a former Post reporter who worked extensively with Shadid in Iraq and also won a Pulitzer for his own work, recalled him as “the best journalist I’d ever seen — without any question.”

“He wrote poetry on deadline,” Fainaru said. “What made him so great as a journalist [was that] he was able to somehow find compassion and empathy in everything he touched and wrote about.”

Fainaru recalled being in Kirkuk in northern Iraq with Shadid and asking the reporter if he thought it was safe to move around. “His response was, ‘I don’t know.’ And then he was gone. He was off reporting. . . . He was not, in my mind, an adrenaline junkie. He took the risks grudgingly, because that’s where the story was.”

Former Boston Globe foreign editor James F. Smith recalled that Shadid didn’t want to leave the West Bank after being shot in 2002 unless he was allowed to take a Palestinian colleague with him through the Israeli checkpoint. “It took hours to negotiate that passage, and Anthony’s life was at risk, but he wouldn’t come out on his own,” Smith said.

Shadid won the prestigious George Polk Award and an Overseas Press Club award; he is among the few foreign correspondents who have won two Pulitzers for foreign reporting.

Speaking to an audience in Oklahoma City about a month after being held with three Times colleagues in Libya, Shadid said he had had a conversation with his father the night before he was detained.

“Maybe a little bit arrogantly, perhaps with a little bit of conceit, I said, ‘It’s okay, Dad. I know what I’m doing. I’ve been in this situation before,’ ” Shadid told the crowd of several dozen people, according to the Associated Press. “I guess on some level I felt that if I wasn’t there to tell the story, the story wouldn’t be told.”

Shadid was a Lebanese American from Oklahoma; he studied at the University of Wisconsin and the American University of Cairo. He was the author of three books on Islam and the Middle East.

“Anthony Shadid’s magic was reporting,” said former Post foreign editor David Hoffman, who also worked closely with Shadid.

“Everywhere he went, he absorbed stories about people and their trials. Once when he was working on his second book, ‘Night Draws Near,’ we had a long talk about how to do it. And I saw how he did it: bundles of notebooks from Iraq, thousands of pages — stories, impressions, smells and sights. One young girl’s diary about those terrible days of war became part of the book, but the diary came to life in his hands.”

Hoffman recalled a memo Shadid wrote in early 2006 about wanting to probe what would happen when the frozen leadership of Arab countries cracked.

He wrote: “To me, this moment is no less sweeping than that experienced by Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Cold War.”

“And he was right,” said Hoffman. “The Arab Spring was what he had been waiting for.”

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The Washington Post Editors Denny McAuliffe and Patricia Gaston and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/world/middleeast/anthony-shadid-reporter-in-th...

The New York Times...

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OBITUARY...

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February 16, 2012
Anthony Shadid, Reporter in the Middle East, Dies at 43
By MARGALIT FOX

Anthony Shadid, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent who died on Thursday at 43, had long been passionately interested in the Middle East, first because of his Lebanese-American heritage and later because of what he saw there firsthand.

Mr. Shadid spent most of his professional life covering the region, as a reporter first with The Associated Press; then The Boston Globe; then with The Washington Post, for which he won Pulitzer Prizes in 2004 and 2010; and afterward with The New York Times. At his death, from what appeared to be an asthma attack, he was on assignment for The Times in Syria.

Mr. Shadid’s hiring by The Times at the end of 2009 was widely considered a coup for the newspaper, for he had been esteemed throughout his career as an intrepid reporter, a keen observer, an insightful analyst and a lyrical stylist. Much of his work centered on ordinary people who had been forced to pay an extraordinary price for living in the region — or belonging to the religion, ethnic group or social class — that they did.

He was known most recently to Times readers for his clear-eyed coverage of the Arab Spring. For his reporting on that sea change sweeping the region — which included dispatches from Lebanon and Egypt — The Times nominated him, along with a team of his colleagues, for the 2012 Pulitzer in international reporting. (The awards are announced in April.)

In its citation accompanying the nomination, The Times wrote:

“Steeped in Arab political history but also in its culture, Shadid recognized early on that along with the despots, old habits of fear, passivity and despair were being toppled. He brought a poet’s voice, a deep empathy for the ordinary person and an unmatched authority to his passionate dispatches.”

Mr. Shadid’s work entailed great peril. In 2002, as a correspondent for The Globe, he was shot in the shoulder while reporting in Ramallah, in the West Bank. Last March, Mr. Shadid and three other Times journalists — Lynsey Addario, Stephen Farrell and Tyler Hicks — were kidnapped in Libya by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces. They were held for six days and beaten before being released.

Later that year, as the Syrian authorities denounced him for his coverage and as his family was being stalked by Syrian agents in Lebanon, Mr. Shadid nonetheless stole across the border to interview Syrian protesters who had defied bullets and torture to return to the streets.

“He had such a profound and sophisticated understanding of the region,” Martin Baron, the editor of The Boston Globe, for whom Mr. Shadid worked during his tenure there, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “More than anything, his effort to connect foreign coverage with real people on the ground, and to understand their lives, is what made his work so special. It wasn’t just a matter of diplomacy: it was a matter of people, and how their lives were so dramatically affected by world events.”

Mr. Shadid was born in Oklahoma City on Sept. 26, 1968, the son of Rhonda and Buddy Shadid. The younger Mr. Shadid, who became fluent in Arabic only as an adult, earned a bachelor’s degree in political science and journalism from the University of Wisconsin in 1990. He later joined The Associated Press, reporting from Cairo, before moving to The Globe in 2001. He was with The Washington Post from 2003 until 2009.

Mr. Shadid joined The Times on Dec. 31, 2009, as Baghdad bureau chief, and became the newspaper’s bureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon, last year.

His first marriage ended in divorce. Survivors include his second wife, the journalist Nada Bakri; their son, Malik; a daughter, Laila, from his first marriage; his parents; a sister, Shannon, of Denver; and a brother, Damon, of Seattle.

He was the author of three books, “Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats and the New Politics of Islam” (2001); “Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War” (2005); and “House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East,” to be published next month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

In a front-page article for The Times last year, Mr. Shadid, reporting from Tunisia amid the Arab Spring, displayed his singular combination of authority, acumen and style.

“The idealism of the revolts in Egypt and Tunisia, where the power of the street revealed the frailty of authority, revived an Arab world anticipating change,” he wrote. “But Libya’s unfinished revolution, as inspiring as it is unsettling, illustrates how perilous that change has become as it unfolds in this phase of the Arab Spring.

“Though the rebels’ flag has gone up in Tripoli,” he continued, “their leadership is fractured and opaque; the intentions and influence of Islamists in their ranks are uncertain; Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi remains at large in a flight reminiscent of Saddam Hussein’s; and foreigners have been involved in the fight in the kind of intervention that has long been toxic to the Arab world.” He added, “Not to mention, of course, that a lot of young men have a lot of guns.”

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PHOTO:
Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post

Anthony Shadid filed by moonlight and satellite modem on a hotel rooftop in Najaf, Iraq, in 2003.

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Anthony Shadid

Mr. Shadid, 43, had been reporting inside Syria for a week.

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PHOTO:
Julia Ewan/The Washington Post

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The New York Times...

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Sue Ogrocki/Associated Press

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Anthony Shadid discussed his arrest by pro-government militias in Libya during a talk at the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum in Oklahoma City last April.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/world/middleeast/anthony-shadid-a-new-york-tim...

The New York Times...

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February 16, 2012
At Work in Syria, Times Correspondent Dies
By RICK GLADSTONE

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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.”

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Anthony Shadid, Reporter in the Middle East, Dies at 43

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Photo:
Ed Ou for The New York Times

Anthony Shadid, center, with residents of Cairo last February.

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