Anthony Shadid, 1968–2012

Anthony Shadid died as he lived—in pursuit of a story few would dare tell. The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist suffered a fatal asthma attack in Syria, after he crawled under barbed wire to meet rebels battling the regime of Bashar al-Assad. It was his second trip to the country in the past year, in spite of a Syrian ban on Western reporters. “He set the standard” for reporting in the Middle East, said former colleague Rajiv Chandrasekaran. “If you cared about the region, if you really wanted to understand what was going on, you read Anthony.”

Shadid was born to Lebanese-American parents in Oklahoma City, said The Washington Post, and began his journalistic career at the Associated Press. He was dispatched to Cairo, where he learned Arabic, the better to report with “precision, nuance, and depth” from the Middle East. The Boston Globe hired him in 2001 to cover the West Bank, where he was shot in the shoulder while covering demonstrations in Ramallah.

Shadid was hired by The Washington Post in 2003, said PBS.org, and posted to Iraq, where he remained throughout the U.S. occupation. His “fluency in Arabic and the language of Islam” permitted him to tell the stories of ordinary Iraqis caught up in the conflict, documenting their “confusion, anger, and search for identity” as the sectarian fighting escalated. His reporting in Iraq won him Pulitzers in 2004 and again in 2010.

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Shadid joined The New York Times at the end of 2009, just in time to bring his “singular combination of authority, acumen, and style” to the uprisings and revolutions of the Arab Spring, said The New York Times. He wrote dispatches from Lebanon, Egypt, and Libya, where he and several Times colleagues were detained for six days last March and beaten by pro-Qaddafi forces. More recently, he entered Syria to interview protesters who had “defied bullets and torture to take to the streets.”

Though he constantly put himself in danger, Shadid said he felt a responsibility to experience Middle Eastern turmoil firsthand. “I guess on some level I felt that if I wasn’t there to tell the story,” he said, “the story wouldn’t be told.”