R.I.P.: Anne Garrels, Longtime NPR Foreign Correspondent

Anne Garrels, an international correspondent for NPR who reported from the front lines of major conflicts around the world, including during the American “shock and awe” bombing of Baghdad in 2003, died on Wednesday at her home in Norfolk, Conn. She was 71.

Anne Garrels

Her brother, John Garrels, said the cause was lung cancer, according to The NY Times.

Ms. Garrels started her journalism career in television at ABC News. But it was at NPR, where she worked for more than two decades, that she made her name covering strife and bloodshed across the globe. She became known for conveying how momentous events, like wars, affected the people who lived through them. Her backdrops included the Soviet Union, Tiananmen Square, Bosnia, Chechnya, the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Garrels’s reporting is full of history, context, analysis and humor, combined with the skillful use of natural sound.” So read the citation when she won an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for her coverage of the Soviet Union in 1997, though it could have applied to her body of work over the years.

Her elegant personal style and intellectual air masked a zeal for taking risks. She covered both Chechen wars despite a Russian ban on outside journalists. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, she traveled to Afghanistan to report from the front lines of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. During that trip, when journalists in a convoy were ambushed and killed, Ms. Garrels decided that she would be safer traveling alone‌ and embarked by herself on a two-day bus ride to Kabul.‌

Her most acclaimed reporting came during the 2003 Iraq war. More than 500 journalists, including more than 100 Americans, covered the run-up to the war. But once the United States began the all-out bombing campaign known as “shock and awe,” she was one of 16 American correspondents not embedded with U.S. troops who stayed — and for a time was the only U.S. network reporter to continue broadcasting from the heart of Baghdad.

With her vivid reports often picked up by other broadcasters, Ms. Garrels — and her safety — became a story in itself.

Once she was home, other reporters interviewed her about her ordeal. She told of subsisting on Kit Kat chocolate bars and Marlboro Lights, bathing by gathering water in huge trash cans, and powering her equipment by attaching jumper cables to a car battery, which she lugged up to her hotel room every night.

She admitted to Terry Gross of the NPR program "Fresh Air" that she had been worried at times about being taken hostage, but she said she was usually so exhausted at night that she “slept like a baby through the bombing.”