Robert Fisk, a dauntless journalist who was widely praised by colleagues and competitors alike for relentlessly chronicling the Middle East’s many agonies, but who was also faulted by some critics as insufficiently tough at times on despots, died on Friday in a hospital in Dublin. He had what appeared to be a severe stroke, according to his editors at the British newspaper The Independent. With muscular reporting and a pugilistic writing style, Mr. Fisk, who had British and Irish citizenship, covered wars both civil and resolutely uncivil in the Middle East and beyond — in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Israel and its Palestinian territories, Northern Ireland, Algeria and Lebanon, where he long made Beirut his base. “You cannot get near the truth without being there,” he said in “This Is Not a Movie,” a 2019 documentary about his work. Across nearly five decades, the last three for The Independent, Mr. Fisk was unquestionably there.

Source: International New York Times November 03, 2020 21:33 UTC