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February 21, 2012, 8:41 pmSyrian Video Blogger Reportedly Killed in Homs as Shelling Continues By ROBERT MACKEYA video posted on YouTube on Tuesday, said to show the impact of rocket fire in the Syrian city of Homs. According to Syrian activists, the video blogger who recorded these images was killed later in the day.Update: Wednesday, 8:19 a.m. After this post was originally published, Marie Colvin, a journalist whose report from Homs was featured at the end, was killed there.
Original Post: Tuesday | 8:41 p.m. A Syrian video blogger whose images of the fierce military assault in the city of Homs were broadcast around the world in recent weeks was killed on Tuesday, fellow activists said.
The blogger, who chronicled the uprising in Baba Amr, a district of Homs that slipped from government control last year, was identified as Rami al-Sayed by the Web site Bambuser, which hosted streams of live video from his camera on Tuesday, shortly before his death.
In a post on Bambuser’s official blog, the company’s head of marketing, Eva Voors, wrote that Mr. Sayed and three friends were killed in shelling shortly after their live images from Baba Amr were broadcast by the BBC, Sky News and Al Jazeera. Ms. Voors added that Mr. Sayed was born in 1985 and left behind an infant daughter.
On Tuesday, the video Mr. Sayed and his friends uploaded to Bambuser and YouTube, showing the destruction of Baba Amr and the casualties of the bombardment, revealed that they were recording the impact of intense shelling at very close range.
According to information posted on YouTube by his fellow activists, the final, graphic video clip uploaded to Mr. Sayed’s Syria Pioneer YouTube channel on Tuesday shows friends weeping over his body in a makeshift field hospital.
Shakeeb Al-Jabri, a Syrian activist in Beirut who has been gathering information from sources in Homs by telephone, wrote late Tuesday on the activist Al-Ayyam site:
Rami al-Sayed had been known as Rami Abu Maryam and Syria Pioneer. He volunteered his time in Baba Amr as an undercover citizen journalist. He was one of the first activists who risked their lives and braved sniper bullets to film the protests in Homs. Rami also set up a channel to live stream the anti-regime demonstrations and the army’s assaults on the city. Rami never admitted he was the one behind the channel but whenever his colleagues told me he was “out” or “busy,” I was sure to find a live feed on his channel.
Interviews with Rami were often too close for comfort. Sounds of gunfire and explosions are common background noise on calls with activists in Homs (and elsewhere in Syria) but on calls with Rami I often heard shells whizzing by. On my last call with him, he was speaking from an activist hideout. He went there to upload videos of a family that had been buried in the rubble of a collapsed building. All members were dead. “We plead with humanitarian organizations to provide safe passage for the women and children. Leave us men to our fate. But for the sake of humanity, let these women and kids go far from here.” I didn’t know what to tell him. The humanitarian organizations are fully aware of the situation. They will not send aid workers as long as bullets are flying. I thanked Rami for taking the time to talk to me and hung up.
When I woke up today I found a live feed from Baba Amr. It was Syria Pioneer’s channel and it showed the army’s brutal shelling of Homs into the eighteenth day. The feed stopped broadcasting at around 11:00 a.m. (local). Later in the evening, I called another activist in Baba Amr as Rami was not online. The activist relayed to me the sad news that Rami was critically wounded by shrapnel and that he was receiving treatment in the field hospital. A few hours later, Rami passed way.
According to Ahmed Al Omran, a Saudi journalist who reports for NPR, Mr. Sayed was a cousin of Basil al-Sayed, a video blogger who was killed two months ago.
As news of Mr. Sayed’s death spread online, Basma Atassi, an Al Jazeera journalist, translated what she called Mr. Sayed’s last message, which was posted on Facebook by another activist in Homs. According to Ms. Atassi, Mr. Sayed wrote:
Baba Amr is being exterminated. Do not tell me our hearts are with you because I know that. We need campaigns everywhere across the world and inside the country. People should protest in front of embassies and everywhere. Because in hours, there will be no more Baba Amr. And I expect this message to be my last.
The first images of the uprising in Baba Amr Mr. Sayed posted online last July showed protesters boldly taking to the streets with a huge rebel flag, taking up the chant first heard in Tunisia and Egypt, “The people demand the fall of the regime!”
Nine days later he uploaded images of the funeral of a young man said to have been killed by the security forces. In December, he was there when a fellow activist carrying the body of a child confronted Arab League monitors during their visit to Baba Amr. Last week, he filmed rockets pummeling the neighborhood, shells landing just yards away, and brutal, graphic images of the dead and the dying.
Just hours before his death, Mr. Sayed recorded the wrenching scene of a badly wounded father weeping over the body of his baby son.
While restrictions on independent reporting imposed by the Syrian government often make it impossible to verify the authenticity of videos posted online by activists, Marie Colvin, who is reporting from Homs for The Sunday Times of London, was present in the makeshift field hospital in Baba Amr on Tuesday when that boy, who was 2, died. She discussed his death in telephone interviews with CNN and the BBC on Tuesday night, and described it as the result of intense and indiscriminate shelling of a civilian home.
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