Nada Bakri On Husband Anthony Shadid's Death: 'I'm A Little Mad At Journalism'

posted on: Mar 8, 2012

Nada Bakri, wife of the late Anthony Shadid, spoke of her conflicted feelings regarding the profession she and her husband once loved together. Bakri, also a reporter, appeared on Erin Burnett’s CNN show “Outfront” on Thursday.

Shadid was on assignment for The New York Times when he suffered an asthma attack and died while crossing the Syrian border last month. He was 43 years old. The Pulitzer Prize winning reporter covered the Middle East for two decades. He was shot in the West Bank in 2002 and and kidnapped for six days in Libya in 2011.

Bakri described her husband’s life as “unfinished.” She said her husband had “so much more to give, to do,” and that said she “will never understand.”

Bakri choked on her words when asked if she will continue to report on the Middle East. “It’s a hard question,” she said while fighting back tears. “I don’t know…I’m still trying to understand what happened…It’s going to take a lot of time…I feel like I’m a little mad at journalism.”

“Because of the places it made him go, even though he loved it?” Burnett asked.

“Even though he loved it,” Bakri responded. “It will always be hard to do this thing that we did together and we loved doing together so much. It would be hard to do it alone.”

Shadid’s memoir, “House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family and a Lost Middle East,” was released this week. It was originally intended for a late March release, however the publisher moved up the publication date after the heartbreaking news of Shadid’s death.

The Huffington Post