- 07/03/2012 by Barbara Nimri Aziz (Radio Tahrir)

Our celebrated, dedicated, everything-to-live-for journalist died suddenly, and inexplicably, on February 16. Shadid was first reported to have died from an asthma attack on the border of Syria and Turkey. The asthma was a condition he had lived with since his youth. How ironic. It was a childhood asthma that took him, not a rebel bullet or a land mine planted in those hazardous border zones. That’s what we thought.