This is really terrible news.

Anthony Shadid, a prize-winning newspaper correspondent whose graceful dispatches for both The New York Times and The Washington Post covered nearly two decades of Middle East conflict and turmoil, died, apparently of an asthma attack, on Thursday while on a reporting assignment in eastern Syria. Tyler Hicks, a Times photographer who was with Mr. Shadid, carried his body across the border to Turkey.

Mr. Shadid, 43, had been reporting inside Syria for a week, gathering information on the Free Syrian Army and other armed elements of the resistance to the government of President Bashar al-Assad, whose military forces have been engaged in a harsh repression of the political opposition in a conflict that is now nearly a year old [...]

The exact circumstances of Mr. Shadid’s death and his precise location inside Syria when it happened were not immediately clear.

But Mr. Hicks said that Mr. Shadid, who had asthma and had carried medication with him, began to show symptoms early Thursday, and the symptoms escalated into what became a fatal attack. Mr. Hicks telephoned his editors at The Times, and a few hours later he was able to take Mr. Shadid’s body into Turkey.

I was a major fan of Shadid’s work, and he obviously did it with little regard for his personal circumstances. He was shot in Ramallah in the West Bank, harassed in Egypt during the revolution, arrested and tortured in Libya by pro-Gadhafi forces. Despite all this, he wrote amazing prose, illuminating the story on the ground in a host of Muslim countries during this tumultuous period in their history. And now we learn he had an asthma problem serious enough to kill him. Yet he signed up for one dangerous assignment after another.

Shadid will be greatly missed. There aren’t that many reporters left who foreground telling the story of the people on the ground as they live it, rather than the dueling press releases of the officialdom. I learned a lot more from Shadid’s writing than from any general.

Here’s Shadid’s last article for the Times, about how the militias in Libya were beyond the control of the national government, committing human rights violations with virtual impunity. Here’s a taste:

The country that witnessed the Arab world’s most sweeping revolution is foundering. So is its capital, where a semblance of normality has returned after the chaotic days of the fall of Tripoli last August. But no one would consider a city ordinary where militiamen tortured to death an urbane former diplomat two weeks ago, where hundreds of refugees deemed loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi waited hopelessly in a camp and where a government official acknowledged that “freedom is a problem.” Much about the scene on Wednesday was lamentable, perhaps because the discord was so commonplace.

“Some of it is really overwhelming,” said Ashur Shamis, an adviser to Libya’s interim prime minister, Abdel-Rahim el-Keeb. “But somehow we have this crazy notion that we can defeat it.”

There remains optimism in Tripoli, not least because the country sits atop so much oil. But Mr. Keeb’s government, formed Nov. 28, has found itself virtually paralyzed by rivalries that have forced it to divvy up power along lines of regions and personalities, by unfulfillable expectations that Colonel Qaddafi’s fall would bring prosperity, and by a powerlessness so marked that the national army is treated as if it were another militia.

It’s fitting that Shadid’s final output was from a country where the world turned its eyes away many months ago, after the death of Gadhafi. But there he was, still casting a spotlight, because the aftermath of war is as important as the war itself. Shadid was truly a treasure, and he will be missed.