The shocking news of New York Times reporter and University of Wisconsin alum Anthony Shadid’s sudden death last week inspired a rash of memorial articles enshrining the writer as one of the most talented reporters of our time. His passing inspired UW students to glance at some of his works, perhaps to see what the fuss was all about.
And the brief Twitter and Facebook statuses commenting on his death provided the shallow answer to that curiosity. Students echoed the headlines and gave the School of Journalism & Mass Communication an ego boost by posting some of his award-winning work.
But as with all news stories, the attention was kept for a millisecond, if that. Students paused to read a few articles and moved on. I can’t blame them for it really, because Shadid’s death was a drop in the news cycle bucket. For the millisecond that students read about his work, though, I had the hope that they would linger and discover why he had become a pillar in Middle East reporting.
Shadid spent close to 10 years reporting the Iraq War, for which he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. His dispatches were unique in that they revealed what it felt like to be an Iraqi amid a brutal and wretched invasion and subsequent war.
The Iraq War was declared over in December of last year. The announcement, for cynics like me, was a joke, borderline offensive even, when you take into account the exponential amount of conflicts that will continue since the last troops departed Dec. 15.
While studying abroad in Jordan last year, my encounters with Iraqi refugees gave me a real sense of the brutality they have endured. I would sometimes catch a ride with my neighbor, an older Iraqi man who had fled to Amman in 2004. I asked him once what city he was from, and he answered Baghdad. I told I had heard the city was very beautiful once: A cheesy phrase, but the best I could muster up with my Arabic. Most Arabs jump at telling you about how beautiful their hometowns are, but he remained silent. I saw melancholy on his face that I could tell he was used to. The uncomfortable silence weighed down on me, and I understood then that even mentioning Iraq’s past would bring him discomfort.
I remember reading one of Shadid’s articles about a city called Thuluyah, where he described the descent into brutal sectarian violence that has plagued the city, like much of Iraq, since the start of the war. What struck me from the story was Shadid’s description of a mournful sheikh walking in the bullet-pocked city streets, passing a faded sign that said, “Long live Iraq.”‘ His tableaus of daily life in a warzone made the human suffering that reverberated through the country palpable to the reader.
The average college-aged student’s perception of Iraq doesn’t go much further than the images on TV and maybe what they saw in “The Hurt Locker.” We scarcely pay attention to the numbers of civilian deaths that fly out of newscasters’ mouths. Even during the official war, it’s safe to say that most college kids completely forgot the U.S. was knee-deep in conflict.
I hope in commemorating Shadid’s death, we seek the story Shadid was trying to convey. There’s a real cost to war, and it isn’t just trillions of dollars in funding a full-scale occupation. Roughly 110,000 civilians have died since 2003. More than 1.6 million Iraqis have fled the country, and 1.8 million are internally displaced. There are close to five million orphans in Iraq, about half of the country’s children. Data on Iraqi mental health is difficult to acquire, but in lieu of numbers, Shadid gave us a glimpse into the fog of hopelessness and depression that has settled over the country.
Iraq is still in the grips of the bloodshed that the American invasion spurred, and millions of Iraqis are still left unable to return to normalcy. It is important to commemorate Shadid as one of UW’s finest graduates, but if we learn anything from his life’s work, it should be to comprehend the real meaning of war.
Meher Ahmad ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in International Studies and Middle East Studies.
