Soon after I heard the heart-wrenching news that Anthony Shadid had died in Syria, I had occasion to look back at the stories he wrote more than a decade and a half ago when he first came to the Middle East to work for The Associated Press. All this time later, those pieces still impressed.
We were both based in Cairo then, and I remember how there was something special in his copy, a penetration into the mind of the Arab street that eluded so many correspondents.
He had an especially graceful way of capturing the feel and spirit of the place through intelligent use of detail and quotes. Not yet 30, equipped with some conversational Arabic he’d gotten growing up in his Lebanese-American family in Oklahoma, he was even then on a quest to understand the region as deeply as an outsider could and, eventually, to share what he learned with the rest of us.
Those early stories foreshadowed the great journalist he was to become. He did not romanticize or sugarcoat, and yet almost everything he wrote conveyed a sense of history and sympathy for the people of that region fraught with so many problems and conflicts. He was prescient in his choice of topics, writing long before 9/11 about the plotting of Islamic militant cells in Europe, or the buzz surrounding the son of a wealthy Saudi contractor then living in Sudan, someone called Osama Bin Laden.
I left Cairo in 2000 and he left the AP around then to go to the Boston Globe. In early 2003, we met again in Baghdad on the eve of war. There was tremendous pressure on correspondents to leave the city before the imminent U.S. assault. Scores of journalists there were fighting their own frenzied battles on two fronts: opposing the Iraqis’ desire to evict them and editors’ demands that they leave for their safety. I remember one anguished evening with Anthony in the Information Ministry, soon to be set alight during the “shock and awe” bombardment. His editors wanted him to leave, he said, but he would not, could not, miss such an important story, even if it meant losing his job. Eventually, of course, he prevailed and the window to leave the country closed anyway.
In the next few weeks, we who stayed tried to chronicle the experience of ordinary Iraqis. No one captured the drama and surrealism of the ousting of Saddam Hussein quite as skillfully as Anthony. He would manage to sneak off with his driver and sit in curtained living rooms, listening to Iraqis speaking hopefully of the free days that would follow Hussein’s fall, or else, hear their anxiety about the chaos that would surely ensue. For his work that year, he won his first of two Pulitzer Prizes.
Across the region, people liked to talk to him. His name means “martyr” in Arabic and that often gave him an opening. Iraqis were fascinated by the chance to speak directly to an American in their own tongue. He was unfailingly patient and polite, taking notes on his pad, saying “huh,” after a particularly interesting remark, asking more questions and sipping more tea. And at the end of the day, in a candlelit room back at our electricity-challenged hotel, he would hunch over his laptop and write. When things grew tough or he had a problem to ponder, he would call his father back home in Oklahoma for advice and comfort.
After that year, his acclaim grew, both among his colleagues and the public. But it never seemed to change him. He was formidable as a reporter, formidable as a writer, and formidable in his courage and knowledge. But he was unfailingly humble to those around him. His focus and curiosity was mostly on the Iraqis and their society, not on the Americans who had come to occupy it. When the easy victory proved not to be so, and the country shattered along ethnic and sectarian lines, he covered that too.
John Daniszewski is Vice President and Senior Managing Editor, International News and Photos at The Associated Press