It is with great sadness that I learned of Anthony Shadid’s death yesterday. He was an intrepid, extraordinary reporter for publications such as The Washington Post and The New York Times. He won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting twice: in 2004 for his coverage of the United States invasion of Iraq and the occupation that followed and in 2010 for his coverage of Iraq as the United States began its withdrawal.

His obituary in The New York Times appears here, but I wanted to highlight pieces about/by him below, all of which are a must-read:

1) “Libya Struggles to Curb Militias as Chaos Grows” [The New York Times; published February 2012] — the last piece Shadid filed for The New York Times.

2) “Syria’s Sons of No One” [The New York Times; published: August 2011]

3) “4 Times Journalists Held Captive in Libya Faced Days of Brutality” [The New York Times; published March 2011]

All of us had had close calls over the years. Lynsey was kidnapped in Falluja, Iraq, in 2004; Steve in Afghanistan in 2009. Tyler had more scrapes than he could count, from Chechnya to Sudan, and Anthony was shot in the back in 2002 by a man he believed to be an Israeli soldier. At that moment, though, none of us thought we were going to live. Steve tried to keep eye contact until they pulled the trigger. The rest of us felt the powerlessness of resignation. You feel empty when you know that it’s almost over.

They bound our hands and legs instead — with wire, fabric or cable. Lynsey was carried to a Toyota pickup, where she was punched in the face. Steve and Tyler were hit, and Anthony was headbutted.

Even that Tuesday, a pattern had begun to emerge. The beating was always fiercest in the first few minutes, an aggressiveness that Colonel Qaddafi’s bizarre and twisted four decades of rule inculcated in a society that feels disfigured. It didn’t matter that we were bound, or that Lynsey was a woman.

4) “What He Knew” [Columbia Journalism Review; published November 2011]

5) “A Boy Who Was ‘Like a Flower'” [The Washington Post; published March 2003]

He will be missed.

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Update (2/18/2012): The New York Times has an excellent tribute to Anthony Shadid here. Turns out, Shadid filed another piece for the paper just before his death. It was published posthumously by The Times today.