(Image Credit: Pete Muller/AP Photo)

CAIRO – Long lines snaked out of polling stations across Egypt this morning as Egyptians went to cast their ballots in the country’s first free and fair presidential elections, the first in Egypt since President Hosni Mubarak was ousted February 2011.

The sunny day was reflected in the attitudes of the voters who waited happily and calmly, often for hours, to cast their ballots for the 13 candidates. “I think everyone’s upbeat, everyone’s looking forward to the future,” said Mohammed Kamel, the CEO of a real estate development firm who was waiting to vote at a school in Giza. “The country’s sort of been on hold for the past 15 months. Everyone’s looking for stability.”

The faces of the candidates stared out from campaign posters lining Cairo’s congested streets. Voters studied registration lists on walls to figure out where to go as soldiers and police kept the lines at polling stations moving as swiftly as they could. Turnout was expected to top 60 percent among Egypt’s 50 million voters.

Polling here has been inconsistent and is generally unreliable but at least four front-runners have emerged in the race to replace Mubarak and send the military, which has been ruling the country, back to their barracks. They include Mubarak’s former foreign minister, Amr Moussa, a former Muslim Brotherhood official named Abdel Moneim Abul Fotouh, Mubarak’s last prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq, and the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Mohammed Morsi. Many Cairo voters today also expressed support for liberal candidate Hamdeen Sabbahi. If no candidate gets 50 percent in the first round, the top two candidates will face each other in a run-off in mid-June.

“We believe in the change, that’s why all the people here are staying [in line for hours],” said banker Ahmed Morsi, who said he would vote for Sabbahi. “I’m Muslim but I’m not too much into the Islamist [candidates]. I’m trying to choose the one that can make the balance between people. That’s going to be my choice.”

Islamists dominated earlier parliamentary elections, winning around 70 percent of the seats between the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party and the ultra-conservative Salafists. But both the Muslim Brotherhood’s first presidential candidate and the Salafist candidate were disqualified from the election and the Muslim Brotherhood’s popularity has waned since the parliamentary elections. That gave a boost to Abdel Moneim Abul Fotouh, who left the Muslim Brotherhood to run for president and is seen as a moderate, endorsed by Egyptians from Salafists to liberal seculars.

“It’s a long run of struggling against dictatorship,” said professor Ahmad Gamal, voting for Abul Fotouh. “I think today we are divided into two parts: Islamists and liberals. We need Islamists to be moderate and liberals to be moderate.”

“Egyptians feel they need to put an end to this struggle against corruption,” he added. They want “their right to live in a clean country, their rights to live in democracy.”

The turmoil and violence of the past year and a half caused foreign investment to flee the country and tourism to drop precipitously. Unemployment has soared and Egyptians of all stripes complain of skyrocketing crime. That has led to calls for candidates such as Moussa and Shafiq, who many believe can restore stability given their experience in government, even if it was Mubarak’s.

“I think anyone who does not focus on the economy is a president born dead. This is the most significant challenge in the country,” real estate developer Kamel said.

Aside from the big question of who will be president, equally pressing are the questions of what his powers will be, given that a new Constitution has yet to be written, and how prominent the role of the military will be.

But those concerns seemed to take a back seat to the significance of the day as the voters, most reticent to reveal  for whom they were voting, expressed hope for this new chapter in Egyptian history.

“I’m very happy, I feel freedom,” one woman said. “Of course I’m optimistic; a new Egypt and a new era.”

Today’s line-up at the George W. Bush Presidential Center sponsored event, “A Celebration of Human Freedom,” included Ammar Abdulhamid, a Syrian activist living in Washington; Bob Fu, a native Chinese pastor; and Normando Hernandez, a former political prisoner in Cuba.

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the democracy activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, joined the conference via Skype from her living room couch in Myanmar, formerly Burma.

“These are extraordinary times in the history of freedom,” Bush said. “In the Arab Spring, we have seen the broadest challenge to authoritarian rule since the collapse of Soviet communism. Great change has come to a region where many thought it impossible. The idea that Arab people are somehow content with oppression has been discredited forever.”

“America does not get to choose if a freedom revolution should begin or end in the Middle East, or elsewhere. It only gets to choose what side it is on,” he added.

Abdulhamid, founder of the Tharwa Foundation and one of the earliest dissident voices behind the Syrian uprising, introduced Bush today, emphasizing the importance of fearless activism.

“The price of activism could be the death of the human body. But the price of silence could result in the death of human spirit, a far greater price to pay,” Abdulhamid said.

“All of us here today join you in hoping and praying for the end of violence and the advance of freedom in Syria,” Bush told Abdulhamid as he took the stage.

When Suu Kyi appeared on the big screen above the stage, she too offered her support to Abdulhamid’s home country.

“I would like to say to the people of Syria, we are with you in your struggle for freedom,” she said.

Asked if she had a solution to the violence in Syria that has claimed more than 12,000 lives in the last 15 months, Suu Kyi replied, “If there was an easy answer, I think Syria would be at peace now.”

But Suu Kyi said she’s hopeful about peace abroad and at home.

Last month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the United States would begin to ease sanctions in Myanmar, and on Monday, Sen. John McCain advocated for the suspension of sanctions, echoing the recent move by the European Union.

“I am not against the suspension of sanctions, as long as the people of the United States feel that this is the right thing to do at the moment,” Suu Kyi said today.

“I do advocate caution, though,” she said. “I sometimes feel that people are too optimistic about what we are seeing in Burma. You have to remember that the change in Burma is not irreversible.”

And there is reason for optimism. Suu Kyi was sworn in on May 2 as a member of parliament and will soon make her first trip abroad in more than two decades, to London and then Oslo, Norway, to finally accept her 1991 Nobel Peace Prize.

In one final word, Suu Kyi offered advice to her fellow activists: “Persevere. You’ll get there in the end. Don’t lose hope. There are many people who are with you in mind and in spirit.”

In contrast to recent years, the day also saw celebrations as Palestinian demonstrators reveled in what they considered a victory over Israel: a deal that brought an end to the hunger strikes of some 1,600 Palestinians in Israeli prisons, the biggest ever.

There were scattered demonstrations in East Jerusalem and across the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. But on the whole, the day was considerably less violent than last year, when at least a dozen protesters were killed by the Israeli military when trying to cross border fences from Syria and Lebanon into Israel.

Stone-throwing Palestinian youths were met Tuesday with tear gas and rubber bullets at the Qalandiya checkpoint near Jerusalem and at Ofer prison near the West Bank city of Ramallah.

“We don’t want the occupation and we want Israel out,” 21 year-old Dalia Nassar told ABC News at the prison protest as young men with scarves wrapped around their faces hurled rocks at Israeli soldiers. The  who responded with rounds of tear gas.

“I’m not against the existence of Jewish people, I’m against the existence of Israel itself on our land. I have no problem with one state, a democratic state that has Jewish people and Palestinian people,” she said. “But not with occupation.”

Palestinians use May 15 each year to mark the fleeing or eviction of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during and after the Arab-Israeli War of Independence that followed the establishment of Israel in 1948.

“Today, our people from all walks of life unite to commemorate the Nakba, which displaced our people — and they continue to suffer as a result,” Palestinian President Abbas said in a speech Tuesday. “Every Palestinian, man and women, [suffers] whether living under occupation or in the refugee camps.”

In the center of Ramallah, the demonstrations took on a more festive tone as they celebrated Monday’s deal that ended the hunger strikes of 1,600 prisoners, most of whom had been on strike for almost a month.  Two prisoners were on their 78th day without food. They had been protesting solitary confinement, lack of family visits and the practice of “administrative detention,” which allows Israel to hold prisoners indefinitely without charge. Israel agreed to roll back the practices if the prisoners agreed “to completely halt terrorist activity inside Israeli prisons.”

Palestinian and Israeli officials had warned of an outbreak in violence if one or more of the hunger strikers died. The hunger strike hit close to home for Palestinians, many of whom have seen relatives spend time in Israeli prisons.

“A lot of people were woken up by it,” said university student Hanan Hussein at Ofer prison, hoping the hunger strike would galvanize Palestinians. “It just makes you think that you’re not doing enough for your country and you should be doing more.”

(ABC News)

ABC News’ David Kerley and Stephanie Liu report:

The United States is intensifying its strikes in Yemen and increasing its presence there as it pursues al Qaeda.

Two suspected U.S. drone strikes killed 11 suspected al Qaeda militants in southern Yemen Saturday, according to military officials in the country. The news comes on the heels of an escalation in drone activity.

Just two days earlier, two airstrikes in southern Yemen killed seven, including two top al Qaeda leaders. And merely a week ago a drone strike killed Fahd Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso, the Yemeni al Qaeda operative responsible for 2000′s USS Cole bombing.

The strike Saturday near the border of Marib and Shabwa provinces is the third to have been carried out this month. The United States conducted six airstrikes in March and at least six more in April against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the militant Islamist organization primarily active in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. In fact, there have been nearly as many drone strikes already this year as there were all of last year.

Last week, the Pentagon announced that they had resumed sending troops to Yemen to train the country’s counterterrorism forces. The move comes after a suspension of training following the political upheaval that ousted former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

While the United States still has a long way to go, it’s making progress, according to former CIA and FBI official Philip Mudd.

“We’ve gone into the network of the organization,” Mudd said, referring to al Qaeda groups. “The same strategy it seems to me is now being applied in Yemen. That is, look at the entire organization, not just a few leaders, and decimate it from the inside.”

While the escalation in drone strikes is not aimed at any one terrorist, officials would undoubtedly like to get Ibrahim al-Asiri, a Saudi bomb maker adept at breaching aviation security. The Yemen-based Asiri has drawn Defense Department scrutiny for his ability to fashion bombs using hard-to-detect chemicals and hiding them in equipment and clothing.

U.S. officials believe Asiri is the man behind the underwear bomb used by a Nigerian man to try and detonate an aircraft over the United States in 2009. He’s believed to be plotting another attack, putting his ingenious chemical bombs in cameras, hard drives and, surprisingly to some, surgically implanting them in pets and even people.

According to Mudd, such an attack like this is not only a possibility, it’s quite likely.

“You get to a point if especially there aren’t parts you can identify by X-ray, especially metal parts, it could be very difficult to find these kinds of people,” he said.

During Thursday’s Pentagon briefing, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said U.S. military and intelligence units will continue zeroing in on the southern Arabian region, with the help of Yemeni forces on the ground.

“We will continue to take all of the steps necessary to try to go after those who would threaten our country and threaten our — the safety of American people,” Panetta said. “The Yemenis have actually been very cooperative in the operations that we have conducted there.  And we will continue to work with them to go after the enemies that threaten the United States.”

AFP/Getty Images

Molly Hunter (@MollyMHunter) and Aleem Agha (@AleemAgha) report:

Just hours after President Barack Obama delivered his pre-dawn, prime time speech in Kabul marking the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death and reaffirming his commitment to fulfill the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, at least two major explosions rocked the capital, killing seven.

The Taliban claimed credit for the attacks, which began with a suicide car bomb that went off near Jalalabad Road at 6 a.m. and was followed by a much larger explosion two hours later. Taliban leaders told media that they targeted Green Village, a heavily fortified compound home to many westerners including U.S. Department of Defense contractors.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told The Wall Street Journal that the attack was a direct response to Obama’s visit.

“This delivers a message to President Obama that he is not welcome in Afghanistan,” Mujahid said. “When he is in Afghanistan, we want him to hear the sound of explosions. Afghanistan does not want his imposed strategy.”

At least 17 people were also wounded in the blasts, most of which were children on their way to school, according to the Interior Ministry.

In the aftermath of the explosions, well-trained contractors and private security forces reportedly defended the facility against insurgent rocket-propelled grenades. At this hour, the firefight is ongoing and it is unclear to what extent the compound has been compromised.

Two suicide attackers remain inside Green Village and are “resisting,” The Associated Press reports.

The U.S. Embassy posted an Emergency Advisory to U.S. Citizens warning of an ongoing attack in Kabul, telling U.S. citizens to take shelter immediately. This followed an earlier tweet from @USEmbassyKabul: “Duck and cover here at the embassy. Not a drill – avoid the area.”

The U.S. Embassy remains on lock down and has cancelled all appointments for Wednesday.

Green Village was also the target of protests following the burning of Qurans at a U.S. base in February but protesters were unable to breach the compound’s high walls.

ISAF has not released any casualty numbers, but the Kabul Police Chief, General Ayoub Salangi, tells ABC News that at least six people were killed including a Gurkha guard and an Afghan student.

TOLO News showed images of flames coming out of smoldering cars and Associated Press footage shows wounded men covered in blood being carried away from the attack site.

President Obama left Kabul roughly two hours before the attacks began and had cleared Afghan airspace by daylight.

Afghan Security Forces released a statement Wednesday saying that it led a capable and quick response in containing and then killing all attackers.

“This is another desperate attack by the Taliban, but again another noteworthy performance by Afghan Security Forces for taking the lead in putting down another desperate attack by insurgents,” General Carsten Jacobson, spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force said.  “Another attack by the insurgency that resulted in the deaths of innocent Afghan civilians, with most of that being children from a nearby school.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Jason Merritt/Getty Images

The grandson of two-time Golden Globe winning actor Omar Sharif “hesitantly confessed” in an article published Sunday that he is gay and half Jewish, and worried about being welcome in Egypt.

Omar Sharif Jr. wrote in The Advocate, “I write this article in fear. Fear for my country, fear for my family, and fear for myself. My parents will be shocked to read it, surely preferring I stay in the shadows and keep silent, at least for the time being. But I can’t.”

Sharif expressed his disappointment at the recent parliamentary elections, writing that the revolution gave him hope for a “more tolerant and equal society,” but now he is not as hopeful.

“The vision for a freer, more equal Egypt — a vision that many young patriots gave their lives to see realized in Tahrir Square — has been hijacked. The full spectrum of equal and human rights are now wedge issues used by both the Supreme Council of the Egyptian Armed Forces and the Islamist parties, when they should be regarded as universal truths,” Sharif wrote.

“I write … for fear that Egypt’s Arab Spring may be moving us backward, not forward,” he wrote.

The Jerusalem Post noted that Sharif’s mother is Jewish, making him fully Jewish according to rabbinical tradition.

Sharif wrote that admitting he has a Jewish mother is “no small disclosure” for an Egyptian.

“With the victories of several Islamist parties in recent elections, a conversation needs to be had and certain questions need to be raised. I ask myself: Am I welcome in the new Egypt?  Will being Egyptian, half Jewish, and gay forever remain mutually exclusive identities? Are they identities to be hidden?”

Sharif, an actor like his grandfather, left Egypt in January 2011, just before the revolution. He now resides in the United States.

At first, news media in Detroit — Pope’s home town — reported that he was killed while protecting U.S. diplomats in Iraq. But investigations by the State and Justice Departments found that, during a party at a U.S. embassy office in Erbil, Iraq, Pope and a fellow contractor, 27 year old Kyle Palmer, were horsing around with Pope’s 9 millimeter Glock-19 handgun.

Federal prosecutors say, at various times, the two were actually pointing the gun at each other. Then Palmer, who was “considerably intoxicated,” according to the Justice Department, fired the gun without checking whether it was loaded. The bullet struck and killed Pope, then 25 years old.

Both men had been working as security specialists, assigned to protect diplomats, dignitaries and civilian workers in Iraq. Pope joined the company after serving two tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2010, after a plea deal with prosecutors, a federal judge in Mississippi sentenced Palmer to 36 months in prison for involuntary manslaughter and ordered him to pay $6,000 in restitution and fines. But the lawsuit filed by Pope’s family accuses DynCorp International and its employees of concocting a different story, falsely suggesting that Pope was drunk and shot himself.

The family’s attorney, William Goodman, tells ABC News, “the autopsy showed that Justin had not a drop of alcohol or any other intoxicant in him.”

What motive would DynCorp or its employees have for a cover-up? According to Goodman, the episode was deeply embarrassing to the company — one of only three major U.S. contractors operating in Iraq at the time. “They didn’t want the American public to know its money was being spent on criminal and lethal behavior,” Goodman said.

DynCorp International, based in Falls Church, Va., told ABC News in a statement: “This was an extremely tragic accident that occurred several years ago, after working hours, when certain personnel were drinking alcohol in violation of Company policy. Although our thoughts and prayers go out to Mr. Pope’s family and loved ones, the allegations contained within the suit are without merit.”

John Moore/Getty Images

When Charles Arthur Williams, a 41-year-old from Mississippi, showed up for a flight in Peshawar, Pakistan, with 9mm bullets in his bag, he could have quickly become a poster child for Americans who behave badly in Pakistan. Pakistani television channels compared him to Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor who killed two Pakistanis in Lahore and sparked widespread anger and anti-American protests.

But after a brief detention, Williams was released, and the brief fury of press coverage quickly dissipated. Pakistani and American officials worked together behind the scenes, diffusing what could have easily become another talking point for Pakistanis looking to criticize U.S. actions in Pakistan. He quickly left the country the same day.

“Thanks to good Pakistani partners for a sane resolution,” tweeted Richard Hoagland, the deputy U.S. ambassador in Islamabad.

“We didn’t want Ray Davis again, did we?” joked a police officer in Peshawar.

Compare that low-key resolution to the avalanche of public fury when Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Cal.) introduced a non-binding, unlikely-to-pass resolution suggesting the secession of Pakistan’s largest province. Pakistan’s prime minister derided the bill as a challenge to Pakistan’s sovereignty and Pakistan’s foreign minister called it an “an unfriendly and irresponsible attempt … aimed at creating distrust between the people of the two countries.”

Rohrabacher’s resolution touched the third rail in Pakistani politics – and was of course much more public than Williams’ brief detention – but nonetheless, the two stories help reveal the state of Pakistan-U.S. relations: working behind the scenes, broken in public.

In a dozen interviews with Pakistani and American officials, most agree on two things: At a working level, two allies that have struggled through a string of high-profile setbacks are conducting business relatively normally (75 percent normally, says a senior U.S. official, including on intelligence sharing). But at a public level, Pakistan’s government and military cannot admit to helping the U.S. in a war that is still widely referred to in Pakistan as “America’s war on terror.”

Here’s the reason this is important: Until the Pakistani government and military believe they can help the U.S. publicly without risking the wrath of their own people, they will never be able to give the level of cooperation that the United States is looking for as it begins to withdraw from neighboring Afghanistan.  (The U.S. currently has a lower popularity rating in Pakistan than BP did in the U.S. during the massive oil spill that dumped thousands of barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.)

Today, for the first time since American jets killed 24 Pakistani troops in November, the two countries resumed high-level dialogue when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar in London.

Behind the scenes, Pakistan has been helpful in bringing senior Afghan insurgents living inside Pakistan to the negotiating table, U.S. and Afghan officials say. And going into the meeting, Khar expected that Pakistan’s “enabling and facilitating role in Afghanistan” would be acknowledged, according to a senior Pakistani official.

But the official also said Khar would bring up Rohrabacher”s resolution, showing just how upset Pakistan remains and just how important the government believes it is to object publicly to U.S. actions. “We will be discussing the recent statements and attacks on Pakistan vis-à-vis Baluchistan and inform Secretary Clinton in no uncertain terms that this is extremely unhelpful,” the Pakistani official said before the meeting.

A senior Pakistani military official recently described to me how difficult it is to be seen helping the United States in public. He held the top half of a newspaper with two hands, comparing its surface area to the number of Pakistanis who support a close U.S.-Pakistan alliance.

First, he said, the Raymond Davis shooting cut that support in half.

He folded the newspaper; only a quarter of the front page was visible.

He said the Osama bin Laden raid cut the support in half again.

He folded the newspaper again; only a sliver was visible.

Then, he said, American jets killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.

He threw the paper up in the air and showed off empty hands. “There is no more support,” he said.

For the government – which is already seen by many Pakistanis as too close to the U.S. — the removal of that support has led to a delay in the official restart of the bilateral relationship. Weeks ago, Pakistan’s Parliamentary Committee on National Security forwarded 35 recommendations on how to rewrite the U.S.-Pakistan cooperation agreement signed by President Bush and President Pervez Musharraf that recently expired.

Among the recommendations, which committee members said were endorsed by the Pakistani military and the foreign ministry: Charge the U.S. more money to transport equipment through Pakistan to Afghanistan; urge the U.S. to admit how many CIA officers are in Pakistan and what they’re doing; demand that the U.S. better communicate with the Pakistani military during operations near the border.

This year is expected to be an election year in Pakistan, and two committee members said the U.S. was so unpopular, they did not expect the government to follow through on a promise to call a joint sitting of parliament to endorse the recommendations.

“It will be more fashionable to talk against the Americans before the next election than any other thing,” said one committee member who requested anonymity.

The pressure on politicians to speak out against the United States – and on the government not to support the U.S. publicly — has grown since a collection of radical and religious parties came together under the banner “Defence Council of Pakistan.”

In many other countries, their members might be in jail: They include the head of an organization that openly admits to targeting Pakistani Shias and the head of the group that the U.S. says is behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

But this week, as the government again delayed the joint sitting of parliament, the council held a rally in the capital, promising to storm the parliament if the government reinstates the NATO supply line that runs through Pakistan. About 1,000 supporters joined the rally, chanting the names of some leaders as they arrived on stage as if they were heroes or rock stars.

“Do they want to clash with the people of Pakistan? That would be a huge mistake,” warned Hamid Gul, an outspoken former chief of the Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency who is one of the council’s leading members.

He said in an interview on the sidelines of the rally that the council’s objection to the NATO supply line was felt widely across the country. And then he warned the government, speaking only partially rhetorically, not to resume its relationship with the U.S.

“Numbers, sheer numbers. We will not only clash with the government. We will be bringing our Kalashnikovs,” he said. “We will liberate Islamabad.”

In order to give the Pakistani government some political breathing room with its own people, U.S. officials say will continue to be patient for the parliament to act – at least for another two months or so. They also say the U.S. is considering publicly apologizing to Pakistan for the death of its troops in November.

Said the National Security committee member: “The apology is very important… It will create room for the American viewpoint. The families of the martyrs expect that. And so does Pakistan.”

The video was first flagged in the Christian Science Monitor, which was told by a Human Rights Watch official that the regime forces are using the Russian-made 240mm “Tulip.” In the clip, two men are standing in rubble holding up the fanned tails of the exploded ordnance.

Peter Falstead of Jane’s Defence Weekly says the tail fins look “very much like the tail fins from SM-240,” also known as the “Tulip Tree” developed by the Soviets in the 1970s. Today it is the largest mortar system used by any military in the world, and the Syrian army is believed to have up to 10 in service.

“If you wanted to strike at rebel-held positions in a built-up area to which you had no line of sight, and you had no regard whatsoever for the killing of innocent civilians, then I guess the SM-240 would be a weapon of choice,” Falstead told ABC News.

Few of the self-propelled SM-240s (also known as the M-1975) remain in service, Jane’s says, due to its short range and slow firing (around one shell per minute). All-told, the system weighs 60,000 pounds,  its range is between 2,600 and 5,900 feet, and it can fire shells weighing between 300 and 500 pounds.

By comparison, Falstead says the largest mortars used by the U.S. Army are 120mm, noting that they do have howitzers of a larger caliber.

 To those who work in nasty and dangerous places, he was, simply  Tony. He was always modest, pleasant, generous and, above all,  passionate. At times, he seemed almost nuclear powered.

His writing, his craft and his voice were, simply, brilliant. He was in a league of his own.

When I saw his byline an unfortunate feeling of both excitement and dread drew me into the story. In a few lines, Tony could cut through the bigotry, the misconceptions about Arabs or Muslims and make me connect with the people Tony chose to invite into my life.

A few well chosen words, and I could put myself in the place of that Iraqi shop owner, the Libyan taxi driver or the Sunni police officerin Baghdad. I knew them as fathers, husbands or businessmen, or women  faced with life-and-death decisions.

The excitement came from his rare ability  to share their lives, and his passion for their world. The dread, I am embarrassed to admit, came from a frustration in my own abilities. Although I share his passion, I could never be Tony Shadid. He was just too good. He spoke Arabic and understood the culture in ways I could never have appreciated. He had a unique voice as a writer and a terrific way of illuminating simple events in ways that reflected a greater and profound meaning. He was always compelling.

 I’m a simple broadcast journalist in what, for most of my life, has been a support role. I’m not in his league, but Anthony Shadid is my hero. I know of no other print journalist whom I  admire more than Tony. His work was inspiring. If we want to avoid the conflicts that Tony covered so well, then we need more of what he did.

The conventional wisdom is the audience — that’s you — is only interested in Americans. No one wants to hear from someone who does not look like them, share their religion or their view of the world. I can tell you that those people are, mostly, just like us. They want to live their lives, love their family and leave their children a little better off than when they entered the world. I can say that, but Tony could make you believe it.

Tony died this week. He didn’t perish in a fire fight in Iraq (which he survived), or as a hostage in Libya (which he survived). He was crossing the border from Syria to Turkey after covering the brutal conflict there. He was on horseback. His own immune system, one of those many things that kept him alive, turned against him. He perished from a reaction to the horses — an asthma attack. Some of those who know him think of this fate as twisted, or cruel. I don’t.

Only Anthony Shadid could stop Anthony Shadid. He was that good.

 So as I sit with my laptop in a foreign and strange country I think about his passion and his work. I’ll try harder. We all should. But  I’ll never be as good as Tony.