A voice that haunts

One cold evening in the middle of February this year I walked into a smoke-filled room in a town called Saraqib in northern Syria to find Anthony Shadid sitting shoeless on the floor like a Bedouin and conversing in Arabic with a tall, thin school teacher, one of the leaders of the town’s revolution. A cast-iron stove, fuelled by paraffin, heated the room, and Anthony, a bearded, somewhat burly man, seemed to glow with bear-like warmth. Through the cigarette smoke I could see three notebooks proudly stacked in front of the New York Times reporter, evidently bulging with his observations.

Anthony had watched rebel fighters attempt to blow up an army tank earlier that day, and he was clearly shaken by the audacity and ferocity of Syria’s violence. But he also laughed a great deal, smiling the smile of a reporter who had found a story he couldn’t wait to write — a story gifted to him through the bravery and suffering of ordinary people mounting extraordinary resistance to their own government.