Two Western journalists killed in Syria

[tabatha]

Last edited Wed Feb 22, 2012, 12:49 PM - Edit history (1)

Two Western journalists were killed in the besieged Syrian city of Homs Wednesday when shells hit the house they were staying in, opposition activists and witnesses said.

They were named as Marie Colvin, an American working for Britain’s Sunday Times, and French photographer Remi Ochlik.

A witness reached by Reuters from Amman said shells hit the house in which they were staying and a rocket hit them when they were escaping.

Both were veteran correspondents of wars in the Middle East and elsewhere.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/22/us-syria-journalists-idUSTRE81L0FU20120222

Marie Colvin's last report (warning graphic)

EDIT
See http://ht.ly/9ds8u

[tabatha]

1. My friend, Marie Colvin

(Marie Colvin on her final assignment in Homs)

Her dispatch in last week’s Sunday Times was as painful and brilliant a piece of war reporting as I have ever read. Her description of 300 people, huddled in a wood factory cellar known as “the widows’ basement” under constant bombardment was searing. Yesterday, speaking on Skype from the house in Baba Amr, the district of Homs where she was staying, she described watching a baby die. “This is the worst we’ve ever seen,” she told me. “And they’re getting away with it.”

In her last report, she described “climbing over walls in the dark and slipping into muddy trenches” to meet up with rebel fighters and activists to get to Homs. “So desperate were they that they bundled me into an open truck and drove at speed with with the headlights on, everyone standing in the back shouting “Allahu Akbar” – God is greatest. Inevitably, the Syrian army opened fire,” she wrote. The beginning of the next sentence made me laugh, because I could hear her voice saying it. “When everyone had calmed down….” I can see the scene now, with over-excited fighters making the situation worse, and Marie shouting “Calm down!”, terrified and laughing at the same time.

http://blogs.channel4.com/world-news-blog/my-friend-marie-colvin/20408

[tabatha]

2. Colvin targeted

Syrian Parliament @SyriaParliament
communication between #Syria n officers intercepted by Lebanese intelligence has revealed direct orders issued 2 target Colvin press centre!

[tabatha]

3. Marie Colvin killed: Syrian forces had pledged to kill 'any journalist who set foot on Syrian soil'

By Nabila Ramdani, Peter Allen in Paris2:06PM GMT 22 Feb 2012

The 55-year-old Sunday Times reporter was killed alongside French photographer Remi Ochlik, 28, in a rocket attack on the besieged city of Homs this morning.

Now communication between Syrian Army officers intercepted by Lebanese intelligence staff has revealed that direct orders were issued to target the makeshift press centre in which Colvin had been broadcasting.

If journalists were successfully killed, then the Syrians were told to make out that they had died accidentally in firefights with terrorist groups, the radio traffic revealed.

Just before she died, Colvin had appeared on numerous international broadcast networks including the BBC and CNN to accuse Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad's forces of 'murder'.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/9098511/Marie-Colvin-killed-Syrian-forces-had-pledged-to-kill-any-journalist-who-set-foot-on-Syrian-soil.html

[Ruby the Liberal]

4. "There are no military targets here"

"The Syrian army is shelling cold, starving civilians".

Thank you, Marie. RIP.

[tabatha]

5. Homs comes out for slain jourmnalists, Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik.

[tabatha]

6. POSTSCRIPT: MARIE COLVIN, 1957-2012 The New Yorker

Last night, after a long day and before a late dinner, I sat down with my wife to watch the news on CNN. Anderson Cooper was broadcasting from a studio in New York, but his tape was from Syria. He rightly demanded that we watch a two-year-old child in the besieged city of Homs die of shrapnel wounds inflicted by the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The camera stayed on the child until the last breath was out of him. His father cradled him and kept asking what his poor son had ever done to anyone to deserve it.

Then Cooper spoke with a reporter—a very great and experienced reporter—who was on the scene, Marie Colvin, of the Sunday Times of London. The image of Colvin on the screen was instantly recognizable to anyone who has spent time reporting, as she had for a generation, from the Middle East, Africa, Chechnya, the Balkans, or South Asia; after losing an eye in the civil war in Sri Lanka, in 2001, she wore an eye patch. For decades, she has been a ubiquitous presence in the war zones of the world and her reports in the Times were admired in the close-knit world of foreign correspondents for their scrupulous and straightforward eloquence.

On the telephone from Homs, Colvin told Anderson that the death of the child was an emblem of the overall “reality” of what was happening in Homs:

These are twenty-eight thousand civilians, men, women and children, hiding, being shelled, defenseless. That little baby is one of two children who died today, one of the children being injured every day. That baby probably will move more people to think, “What is going on, and why is no one stopping this murder in Homs that is happening every day?”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/02/postscript-marie-colvin-1957-2012.html#ixzz1n9gV3PQ7