Pulitzer Winner Shadid: 'Embedded in the Soul' of Iraq

By: Mark Fitzgerald Washington Post correspondent Anthony Shadid was battling two deadlines Monday morning in Baghad: He was filing a spot news report from the Baghdad slum of Sadr City, where seven U.S. soldiers were killed Sunday -- and trying to get done in time to check out the Pulitzer Prize announcement at 11 a.m. local time.

He learned he had won the Pulitzer for International Reporting in his room at the heavily fortified Sheraton Hotel, where the Post's Iraq correspondents have recently relocated after experiencing security problems at a house where they were staying.

Speaking by phone from Baghdad, Shadid said receiving newspaper journalism's highest honor was both "overwhelming" and yet something he could keep in perspective: "You get so engaged in the work and the story at hand and, as important as this prize is, with this war, it's always just kind of in the background."

Shadid, 35, has been at the Post (Click for QuikCap) for barely 15 months, but he'd already distinguished himself as a correspondent throughout the Middle East and the Islamic world.

"We hired him to be our Islamic affairs correspondent," said Phil Bennett, the Post's assistant managing editor, foreign. "We were looking for an Arabic speaker and someone who could combine the reporting on the religious, political, cultural currents."

Shadid, an Oklahoma City native of Lebanese descent, has been able to use his fluency in Arabic to bring a special perspective to his reporting, Bennett said. "I think what distinguishes his work has been his ability to get inside the Iraqi experience of the war. He's really embedded in the soul of the place in the way other reporters haven't been able to be," Bennett said.

If Shadid sees a key to his own reporting, it comes straight out of Journalism 101. "What has struck me as a reporter in Iraq is how complicated this country is," he said. "It defies expectations. It defies all the cliches. And the only way to navigate that as a reporter is to listen." Rather than expect a neat overview, a reporter in Iraq must take bits and pieces and indicate trends, he said.

Bennett said Shadid's reporting has proved to be remarkably prescient: "He's been attuned to things like religious identity, nationalism, people's uneasiness about America's presence. If you go and read his work over the last year, a lot of what's all happening (now) in this period makes sense."

Shadid demurs a bit from that. "The longer I'm here the less I feel I understand the story," he said. Still, some insights stick out. Where many American supporters of the war expected Iraq after Saddam to become a beacon for democracy, changing the political map of the Middle East, he said, "What I'm always struck by is how the rest of the Middle East also affects Iraq."

How it will end, he is not sure: "People often try to put this into easy categories. Is it a liberation, is it a occupation? I challenge anyone, including myself, to say what this country is going to become."

Shadid came to the Post from The Boston Globe, where he was based in Washington covering the State Department, but also reported frequently from the Middle East. He is a former news editor of the Los Angeles bureau of The Associated Press, and was AP's Middle East correspondent based in Cairo from 1995 to 1999.

The reporter made headlines himself in March 2002, when he was shot in his shoulder while reporting from the West Bank city of Ramallah near the headquarters of Palestinian leader Yassar Arafat. He is the author of the 2000 book, "Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats, and the New Politics of Islam." He has won a George Polk Award for foreign reporting.

Shadid said he always knew he was going to be a journalist. At first, though, he thought he would be in radio. Assigned an overnight shift while studying Arabic at the University of Wisconsin, he quickly decided that he was made for newspaper hours. Somehow, too, he knew that his journalism future would involve the Middle East. "It's a region of great important, with a great history and great tragedies as well," Shadid said. "It's so important, especially now to be in Iraq and have a chance to chronicle what is happening."

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