• NBC's Richard Engel: NYT reporter Anthony Shadid was 'absolutely brilliant'

    Willie Geist, Mike Barnicle and the Morning Joe panel remember New York Times foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid, who died Thursday in Syria of an apparent asthma attack.

    Richard Engel, NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent writes

    Anthony Shadid, the New York Times correspondent who died in Syria on Thursday, was better than the rest of us.  He wasn’t the fastest to a story, or the biggest daredevil or the most technical with a satellite phone.  Sure, he was good at all those things.  But he was absolutely brilliant at something else.  Shadid could hear the story.

    He could feel it in the tips of his fingers.  He could do what may be impossible.  He could make war subtle.

    This is what I mean.  During the often overlooked, ferociously dangerous 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, reporters in southern Lebanon generally rushed to the bombing sites.  The faster we got there, the fresher and more compelling our stories and pictures would be.  And there were incredibility compelling stories.  In the first three weeks of the conflict, Israel dropped as much tonnage of explosives on southern Lebanon as it used in the 1973 Mideast war.

    NYT: Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Shadid dies in Syria

    Hezbollah fired rockets indiscriminately into Israeli cities, driving thousands into shelters.  We rushed and ran and sometimes even dodged and the world watched and read.  Anthony covered it differently.  He’d go out in the morning and find some tiny village, tucked away on a hillside, where none of us thought to go.  He’d find his story in the details, not the fireballs.  It takes a sensitive ear to do that.  War is a loud place, full of emotions, explosions, gore, fatigue, pity, outrage and rage.  But Anthony managed to pick out the quiet notes, and hear the melody playing sotto voce under the cacophony.

    I say "us" because there is an "us" in the business, which is really more of a life than a career.  There is a small – tragically, dwindling – brotherhood and sisterhood of reporters who cover conflict, specifically conflict in the Middle East.  Anthony was one of our founding members.  When I first moved to Cairo in 1996, the first person I was told to look up was Anthony.  “He’s got a good feeling of what’s going on over there,” I was well advised.  Anthony and I were together in Baghdad during the 2003 US bombing.  Baghdad for all of 'us' was a defining period, an extended nightmare of car bombings, flag ceremonies, kidnappings and military acronyms.  I last saw Anthony a few months ago.  He looked great.  He was in a good place.

    Rachel Maddow reports the sad news of the passing of New York Times reporter Anthony Shadid.

    He was relaxed and happy.  We were at the airport in Tunisia.  We’d just covered a year of the Arab Spring.  It was different from all those years in Baghdad.  It was interesting.  It was complicated.  It was big history.  It needed a subtle ear.  It was perfect for Anthony.

    It was his time.  I am so sorry his time was cut short.  I’ll miss his voice.  I’ll miss his compassion.  There’s so much more to reporting than just bullets, bombs, rebels and ballots, and nobody knew that more than Anthony.  Rest in peace, brother.

    More from msnbc.com and NBC News:

  • Not the real thing

    James Taranto raised a question Tuesday in his blog on WSJ.com about whether Richard Engel had overlooked a story in Sidon, Lebanon.

    According to Taranto, one of his readers noticed what looked like uncut sheets of U.S. $100 bills on the ground in Richard's report that aired Monday on Nightly News. Taranto wondered if Engel had stumbled across a Hezbollah counterfeiting operation that had been blown to bits.

    Richard explained over the phone from Tyre, Lebanon, Wednesday that the bills shown were not real bills but photocopies. He said the bills were not on currency quality paper and were too small to be passed off as real currency.

    He also explained that, often times when people are dealing with a lot of cash, as they would be at a bank, they photocopy the currency as a form of record keeping and to check out that the serial numbers are correct -– to make sure that the dollars they got were real dollars.

    You can watch Richard's report from Monday for yourself here.

  • Roadways turn to battlegrounds

    The roads in Lebanon are now battlegrounds. We got a firsthand look at just how dangerous they have become as we drove on Monday from Beirut to Tyre, the war-torn city in Southern Lebanon. 

    We left Beirut at around 8 a.m. this morning. Since we were not sure what exactly we were heading into, we all packed provisions for at least a week. We brought extra fuel, cans of tuna fish, satellite communications, a generator and clothing for a week. We marked our vehicles "PRESS" and we headed out in a convoy with some other journalists.

    Just a few minutes after we left Beirut, we hit our first dead end. The road was destroyed, so we had to turn around and find an alternative route. Instead of going through the mountains, which had been our initial plan, we headed for the coastal road, toward Sidon. 

    The further south we went, the clearer the devastation. Many of the bridges, roads and factories we passed were destroyed. We saw a fuel depot that was roaring with flames and putting out plumes of black smoke maybe a mile across the horizon.

    When we arrived in Sidon itself, we saw much more destruction than we had expected. There were several blocks of the city that were basically flat. Several banks and insurance agencies were totally destroyed. 

    We met a man there who worked for an American insurance provider for 50 years and he showed us his office that was destroyed. You couldn't even recognize that the buildings had been banks except for the fact that there were files, photocopies and papers on the floor that identified the financial institution. 

    We kept driving and there were huge craters in the sides of the road. Some of the craters had turned-over cars inside them because if you try to drive at night, you have no idea what you are driving into. 

    This is very much a Hezbollah area, so along the road there are posters of Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. There are also fighters and propaganda slogans. Near one mosque, there was a poster that said "Where are you Muslim armies? Why aren't you coming to fight to defend us?" As we were driving we were listening to the Hezbollah radio station called "The Station of Light." They are pumping out nothing but wartime propaganda and Hezbollah songs encouraging people to march to the battle.

    After we drove through Sidon, we diverted our path again -- at one point we drove through a banana plantation -- and eventually we reached Tyre. 

    Tyre is a city that has been significantly war torn. Since we arrived we've heard shelling and Israeli air strikes, and we've see some of the leaflets that were dropped by the Israelis with pictures showing Nasrallah as a scorpion stinging the state of Lebanon. 

    The city is very much abandoned. The hotel where we are staying has been effectively turned into a refugee shelter. There were dozens, if not a few hundred refugees, sleeping in the lounge on all of the hotel furniture. A lot of the refugees tell a very similar story. They say that they are afraid to drive the roads because as civilians leave the city, convoys of vehicles have been attacked. 

    We met 9-year-old Mohammed Tsrur -- his face was badly burned. He had some sort of a white disinfection cream on his face and his lips were mostly burned away. He had been in a car last night with his mother, two brothers and baby sister. They also suffered burns, but not as badly. We were sitting there talking to him, and he still had blood on his face –- his skin was so thin that the blood was just seeping through. He was waiting to try and get evacuated. But people here are afraid that is what's going to happen to them if they drive out of the city. 

    At the main hospital, a convoy of two Red Cross ambulances was also hit by an Israeli air strike, according to Red Cross officials. The ambulance driver survived.

    There is a palpable frustration and fear. People feel that they are really trapped because the roads have become battlegrounds and there is no safe way out.

  • American frustration grows in Lebanon

    The students at the American University in Beirut are all disappointed in the American Embassy here. They feel very ill-informed and say the embassy has not been in touch as much as they would have liked them to be. They are very frustrated that they have to pay for their own evacuation. They have had to find promissory notes saying that they are going to pay for the ferry to leave this country –- about $300-500. And that they will have to leave things behind and will only be allowed to take one carry-on. But mostly, they ask, why is it taking so long?

    They have seen other embassies evacuating their people out of the country – the French, British, Germans – with a sense of urgency. We watched the French leave earlier today and could see the immediacy of how it was all carried out – names were just scrawled on suitcases in chalk.

    They are also frustrated that they are finding out most of their information from the media. People are calling home and finding that their parents are giving them more information than the embassy. They are not even getting one e-mail a day from the embassy as developments are happening hour by hour. So, people here are wondering: If we have the best resources in the world, why is this taking so long?

    Now, obviously, this is an unusual circumstance and I've seen crisis situations like this elsewhere, but I was surprised that they are not even getting one e-mail a day.

    Americans who are living outside of Beirut are feeling very neglected. Americans who are here visiting family in southern Lebanon are feeling very cut-off and they don't know how they are going to get out. In Beirut, it's relatively easy to get people out at this point, you can still get in a car and drive around the city. But in south Lebanon – the situation is more precarious. 

    Things have changed dramatically over the last week. There is a realization creeping in that this is going to last a long time and that this situation could take unexpected turns for the worse. 

    Now there is a rush to get out. When we first got here there was a sense that this was a serious situation, but now there is a real sense of urgency. 

    But the situation is different for the average Lebanese person. If they leave, where exactly are they going to go? If Syria, where do they stay? Or do you just hunker down and live through this? Many Lebanese are saying that we are back at war, and now we have to get through this as we have lived through other wars in the past.

    The real fear here in Lebanon is that this situation is going to spill into some sort of civil conflict. There is a real fear that after all of this fighting, and all of the wars that the Lebanese people have already had to go through themselves, that this stress on society will re-ignite social conflict.

  • Taking cover in Beirut

    This afternoon, we were standing on a hilltop -- our perch over the last several days that overlooks Beirut and is a good vantage point to see much of the city. While we were there watching the Israeli air strikes in southern Beirut, we suddenly heard a very, very loud explosion very close to us. It was loud, so everyone got down. And then, all of a sudden, something launched from the area and it looked like a missile. We saw it leaving the ground, spinning in the air and all of us watched as this thing that looked like a missile turned and started coming straight for us. 

    Journalists started scrambling off of the hill and there were a couple of people screaming. It was sparking and spinning like a weapon out of control. It was coming right for us, burning in the sky. And then luckily, it just plummeted to the ground, landed at the bottom of the hill, and no one was hurt.

    Now, it may have been, according to Israeli and Lebanese reports, a Hezbollah rocket attempt. We are hearing that may have been the first attempted launch of these super long-range Hezbollah rockets -– the ones that can reach distances up to 100 miles. So what we may have seen coming down near us was a unique kind of rocket that Hezbollah has never successfully launched so far. That still needs to be confirmed, but that is what we are hearing right now.

  • Until this week, Beirut was back

    BEIRUT, Lebanon — It's hard to believe, but until this week, Beirut was back!

    When many Westerners think of the Lebanese capital, they think of all the kidnappings, of a city that was basically bombed out and burned up.

    But for the last several years, it has enjoyed tremendous economic prosperity. Restaurants have been restored, tourists have been coming here, prices for real estate have gone through the roof, and it's not uncommon to see sports cars like Ferraris on the street.

    A few weeks ago, I was here and working on just that story — it was even called "Beirut is back." It was supposed to be about how the economy has revived, the restaurants are full, the nightclubs are hopping, and the beaches are full of women in bikinis.

    Today I'm standing here wearing a flak jacket, watching the airport burning, and there are more strikes expected.

    Editor's note: Read the rest of Richard's reporter's notebook, written for MSNBC.com, here.

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