Foreign Correspondent Anthony Shadid, 43, dies in Syria

Paul Farhi and Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post
February 17, 2012

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 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.

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This article was posted: Friday, February 17, 2012 at 11:09 am

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