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February 22, 2012, 10:37 amAmerican Reporter Marie Colvin’s Final Dispatches From Homs By ROBERT MACKEYBritain’s Channel 4 News broadcast a telephone interview with Marie Colvin, an American journalist in Homs, Syria, on Tuesday. Hours later, she was reportedly killed.Updated | 4:10 p.m. As my colleagues Rod Nordland and Alan Cowell report, Marie Colvin, an American writer working for The Sunday Times of London, and Rémi Ochlik, a French photographer, were killed early Wednesday in Homs, a Syrian city under assault by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad.
Just hours before her death, Ms. Colvin, a veteran war correspondent, described the death of a young boy she had witnessed on Tuesday in telephone interviews with the BBC, CNN and Britain’s Channel 4 News.
Accompanying Ms. Colvin’s description of the young boy’s death in a makeshift clinic in the besieged Homs neighborhood of Baba Amr, the BBC also showed footage from the clinic recorded by Paul Conroy, an Irish photographer who traveled to Homs with her.
Ms. Colvin’s interview with CNN, in which she discussed the boy’s death and the importance of bringing such disturbing images to the world’s attention, was illustrated with video from the YouTube channel of a Syrian activist, Rami al-Sayed, who was reportedly killed just hours later.
As David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, noted in a blog post on Ms. Colvin’s death, in the interview with Anderson Cooper of CNN:
Clearly, and without hype, Colvin described how every house in Homs had been hit, including the top floor of the house where she was taking refuge. There was cool but profound rage in her voice. Of Bashar al-Assad’s armed forces, Colvin said, “It’s a complete and utter lie they’re only going after terrorists. The Syrian Army is simply shelling a city of cold, starving civilians.”
Cooper remarked, admiringly, that it was rare to hear a journalist use the word “lie.”
On Wednesday, activists in Homs posted graphic video online that was said to show the bodies of Ms. Colvin and Mr. Ochlik, buried beneath rubble. A new video clip from the makeshift clinic showed the Irish photographer, Mr. Conroy, and a French journalist, Edith Bouvier, who was reporting for Le Figaro, apparently receiving treatment for wounds sustained in the same attack.
Channel 4 News reports that Ms. Colvin’s death was announced to her colleagues at London’s Sunday Times in an e-mail from the publication’s owner, Rupert Murdoch. He wrote:
It is with great sadness that I have learned of the death of Marie Colvin, one of the most outstanding foreign correspondents of her generation, who was killed in Homs in Syria today while reporting for The Sunday Times.
She was a victim of a shell attack by the Syrian army on a building that had been turned into an impromptu press centre by the rebels.
Our photographer, Paul Conroy, was with her and is believed to have been injured. We are doing all we can in the face of shelling and sniper fire to get him to safety and to recover Marie’s body.
Marie had fearlessly covered wars across the Middle East and south Asia for 25 years for The Sunday Times. She put her life in danger on many occasions because she was driven by a determination that the misdeeds of tyrants and the suffering of the victims did not go unreported. This was at great personal cost, including the loss of the sight in one eye while covering the civil war in Sri Lanka. This injury did not stop her from returning to even more dangerous assignments.
In her final report from Homs for The Sunday Times of London, Ms. Colvin wrote:
Snipers on the rooftops of al-Ba’ath University and other high buildings surrounding Baba Amr shoot any civilian who comes into their sights. Residents were felled in droves in the first days of the siege but have now learnt where the snipers are and run across junctions where they know they can be seen. Few cars are left on the streets.
Almost every building is pock-marked after tank rounds punched through concrete walls or rockets blasted gaping holes in upper floors. The building I was staying in lost its upper floor to a rocket last Wednesday. On some streets whole buildings have collapsed — all there is to see are shredded clothes, broken pots and the shattered furniture of families destroyed.
My colleague Neil MacFarquhar had dinner with Ms. Colvin and Mr. Conroy in Beirut last week, the night before they left for Syria. In a post on our At War blog, he writes:
Over dinner, Ms. Colvin reminisced about the time when we had both been stuck in the Intercontinental Hotel in Amman, Jordan, under similar circumstances in September 1996, waiting for official visas to get into Iraq. While waiting, Ms. Colvin had interviewed some Iraqi refugees who went into gory detail about how the sons of President Saddam Hussein slayed their two brothers-in-law when the two men unexpectedly returned to Baghdad after seeking asylum in Jordan.
When official visas for the press corps came through to Baghdad several days later, with Ms. Colvin one of the few reporters denied one. “I remember people griping that the story was much too bloody, but it turned out that was barely the half of it,” Ms. Colvin said over dinner in Beirut.
Ms. Colvin was no stranger to risk, wearing a distinctive black eye patch ever since she lost an eye while crossing between enemy lines in Sri Lanka in 2001.
Her photographer, Paul Conroy, showed up late for the dinner. They talked briefly about their plans and about the coming danger. They recalled living under shellfire for some six weeks last year in the besieged city Libyan city of Misrata. Mr. Conroy had just received a Facebook message from one of the Libyan doctors who had helped them find a place to shelter in the hospital — the doctor grousing that it had taken him forever to work through all the Irish Paul Conroys on Facebook before finding the right one.
But Ms. Colvin told me that she had an new appointment with the smugglers in the morning, and this time she had a telephone number to call, giving her the sense that the trip to Homs on Tuesday, Feb. 14, would happen.
“Before I was apprehensive, but now I’m restless,” she said, as we walked up the stairs back into the hotel for the night. “I just want to get in there and get it over with and get out.”
Journalists who worked alongside Ms. Colvin during her long career have been posting tributes to her online. Writing for The Guardian, Maggie O’Kane, a fellow correspondent, called her “the bravest woman I have ever known,” and Roy Greenslade, a former editor, observed that “the essence of Marie’s approach to reporting” meant that she “was not interested in the politics, strategy or weaponry; only the effects on the people she regarded as innocents.” Lindsey Hilsum of Channel 4 News reported, “Yesterday, a few hours before she was killed, I asked whether she had an ‘exit strategy.’ ‘We’re working on that now,’ she said. Her interest in her own safety was dwarfed by her commitment to the story.”
My colleague Steven Erlanger sent these thoughts to The Lede:
Marie Colvin would always turn up in the most gruesome places and make them brighter. I remember her in Northern Ireland, Chechnya, Kosovo and Gaza, a big smile somehow dissipating the dust and sadness. Everywhere she saw her task as bringing war home to readers, as she saw it expressed in the broken lives of those who suffered or even those who prosecuted the violence. But she always did so in a clear, clean way, with little horn-blowing, narcissism or bias. She was brave before she lost an eye to shrapnel in Sri Lanka; somehow, though it cost her more, she managed to be as brave afterwards. She had trouble with her prosthesis, so wore a patch, which gave her a kind of piratical distinction. It made her more famous, and she become a role model for many younger journalists, especially women, for whom she helped mightily to clear the path. I admired her terribly.
To lose Anthony Shadid and Marie Colvin in a week is a wretched blow for us, their colleagues, and for readers everywhere.
Like Ms. Colvin, Mr. Ochlik covered the war in Libya last year, and his vivid images of that conflict won him a World Press Photo award. According to a note on his Web site, Mr. Ochlik’s work appeared in many publications, including Le Monde, Paris Match, Time and The Wall Street Journal.
In a post on our Lens blog about Mr. Mr. Ochlik, my colleagues Kerri MacDonald James Estrin and David Furst report that he was “the second photographer in a close group of friends to die covering conflicts in the Middle East in just over a year.”
E-mailPrintRecommendShare CloseTumblrDiggLinkedinRedditPermalink Syria Related PostsFrom The LedeSyrian Video Blogger Reportedly Killed in Homs as Shelling ContinuesVideo Appears to Show Protest Interrupted by Gunfire in Syrian CapitalUnder Extreme Pressure, Assad’s Opponents Retain Defiance and Sense of HumorRecalling the Start of the Uprising in a Syrian City Now Under FireTracing the Weapons of Bashar al-Assad Previous Post Recalling Nixon in China, 40 Years Later Next Post Virginia Lawmakers Vote on Modified Ultrasound Bill Search This Blog Previous Post Recalling Nixon in China, 40 Years Later Next Post Virginia Lawmakers Vote on Modified Ultrasound BillFollow This BlogTwitterRSS What We're Reading on TwitterMr. Ochlik covered the 2010 cholera epidemic and presidential elections in Haiti, where he first traveled as a photographer in 2004. Last year he worked in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, where he shot “Battle for Libya,” a photo story that won him first prize in the general news category from World Press Photo earlier this month.
While Mr. Ochlik was in Tunisia, Lucas Mebrouk Dolega, a photographer for the European Pressphoto Agency, died from an injury suffered while covering violent street protests. The two were close friends. Mr. Ochlik helped create the Lucas Dolega Award — which was given to Emilio Morenatti — in his friend’s memory.
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