By Maya Trent · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer (2012) · Wayback archive →
In mid-February 2012, Pulitzer-Prize-winning New York Times foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid died of an asthma attack while on assignment in Syria. He was 43.
Then
Shadid had won two Pulitzers for his Middle East reporting and had been at the New York Times since 2009. The cause was an acute asthma attack triggered by exposure to horses near the Syrian border during his exfiltration with photographer Tyler Hicks. He had been on assignment without a Syrian visa, having entered the country covertly to report on the Assad regime’s crackdown.
Now
Shadid’s posthumous book House of Stone was published in March 2012, weeks after his death. The Syrian civil war became one of the defining conflicts of the 2010s; Assad’s regime was eventually overthrown in December 2024 by an opposition offensive that swept through Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and Damascus across two weeks — ending the family rule that had lasted since 1971. Foreign-correspondent deaths in the years since have continued — Marie Colvin days after Shadid in February 2012, then Foley, Sotloff, and Mueller in the ISIS-era reporting cycle. Jill Abramson ran the NYT through May 2014.