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Journalist dies while telling of horrors in Syria

In Homs and other danger zones, Marie Colvin was driven to expose how war ravages innocent lives.

The Associated Press

LONDON - She was instantly recognizable for the eye patch that hid a shrapnel injury -- a testament to Marie Colvin's courage, which took her behind the front lines of the world's deadliest conflicts to write about the suffering of individuals trapped in war.

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Journalist Marie Colvin is shown in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in an undated photo. She and French photojournalist Remi Ochlik were killed Wednesday in the besieged city of Homs, Syria. She lost the sight in one eye when she was hit by shrapnel in Sri Lanka in 2001.

The Associated Press

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ASSAD APPEARS TO BE AIMING FOR A CRIPPLING BLOW

Syrian President Bashar Assad is using most of his ground forces in an intensified drive to crush the uprising against his family's four-decade rule in what could be a critical test of his minority-run military's cohesion, according to U.S. officials and experts.

Assad and his inner circle are apparently betting that their ferocious artillery-backed onslaught on the city of Homs will deal a crippling blow to the insurgency, which would be followed by seizures of other rebellious cities and towns. Refugees arriving in Leban- on say Assad's forces already have retaken the town of Zabadani.

The regime, however, may be in a race against time: The longer the insurgents hold out, the greater the risk of the army becoming overstretched; the more civilians killed and maimed in the wanton pummeling of opposition strongholds, the greater the threat of the army fraying, plunging the country into all-out sectarian war, some experts warn.

"We've been building up to a critical test over the last few months and that test is in the form of whether or not the regime can make significant gains in terms of taking back critical terrain," said Aram Nerguizian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, based in Washington.

The regime began intensifying military operations after the withdrawal last month of an Arab League observer mission, experts said. The mission left in disarray after failing to curb the bloodshed ignited when Assad's troops responded with gunfire against peaceful protests that began just over a year ago.

Assad was further encouraged to step up his scorched-earth strategy by Russia and China's Feb. 4 vetoes of a U.N. Security Council resolution that would have backed an Arab League peace plan calling for Assad to step down, U.S. officials and experts said.

– The Associated Press

After more than two decades of chronicling conflict, Colvin became a victim of it Wednesday, killed by shelling in the besieged Syrian city of Homs.

Colvin, 56, died alongside French photojournalist Remi Ochlik, the French government announced. Freelance photographer Paul Conroy and journalist Edith Bouvier of Le Figaro were wounded.

Colvin, from East Norwich, N.Y., had been a foreign correspondent for Britain's Sunday Times for more than 25 years, making a specialty of reporting from the world's most dangerous places. The newspaper posted her final dispatch outside the website's pay wall, so anyone could read her account from a cellar offering refuge for women and children. The report chronicled the violence that eventually took her own life.

"It is a city of the cold and hungry, echoing to exploding shells and bursts of gunfire," Colvin wrote. "There are no telephones and the electricity has been cut off. Freezing rain fills potholes and snow drifts in through windows empty of glass. No shops are open, so families are sharing what they have with relatives and neighbors. Many of the dead and injured are those who risked foraging for food.

"Fearing the snipers' merciless eyes, families resorted last week to throwing bread across rooftops, or breaking through communal walls to pass unseen."

Colvin often focused on the plight of women and children in wartime, and Syria was no different. She gave interviews to major British broadcasters on the eve of her death, appealing for the world to notice the slaughter taking place.

"I watched a little baby die today," she told the BBC on Tuesday. "Absolutely horrific, a 2-year-old child had been hit. They stripped it and found the shrapnel had gone into the left chest and the doctor said 'I can't do anything.' His little tummy just kept heaving until he died."

In the 1990s, Colvin worked in the Balkans, where she went on patrol with the Kosovo Liberation Army as it engaged Serb military forces. She worked in Chechnya, where she came under fire from Russian jets while reporting on Chechen rebels seeking independence for their region. She also covered the conflict in East Timor after its people voted for independence in Southeast Asia.

She was one of the few reporters to interview ousted Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi in his final days before his death in October. Her mother, Rosemarie Colvin of East Norwich, described her daughter as passionate about her work, even when it got very hard.

"She was supposed to leave (Syria) today," Rosemarie Colvin said, adding that her daughter spoke Tuesday with her editor, who ordered her to leave because it was so dangerous. "She had to stay. She wanted to finish one more story."

The eldest of five children, Colvin is survived by her mother, two sisters and two brothers. Rosemarie Colvin invited reporters into her home, fighting back the tears.

"The reason I've been talking to all you guys is that I don't want my daughter's legacy to be 'no comment because she wasn't a 'no comment' person," she said. "Her legacy is: Be passionate and be involved in what you believe in. And do it as thoroughly and honestly and fearlessly as you can."

A graduate of Yale University, Colvin had never planned to be a journalist. She studied anthropology, later taking the rigorous study of people and places and putting it to good use writing about individuals caught up in suffering caused by war.

"Our mission is to speak the truth to power," she said during a tribute service for slain journalists at Fleet Street's St. Bride's Church in November 2010. "We send home that first rough draft of history. We can and do make a difference in exposing the horrors of war and especially the atrocities that befall civilians."

Colvin's death comes shortly after two other respected journalists died while reporting on the uprising against Syria's president, Bashar Assad. Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Anthony Shadid, a correspondent for The New York Times, died last week of an apparent asthma attack while slipping out of Syria.

Award-winning French TV reporter Gilles Jacquier was killed in an explosion in Homs on Jan. 11, becoming the first Western journalist to die since the uprising began. His colleagues believe he was murdered in an elaborate trap set up by Syrian authorities -- a claim that Assad's government has denied.

Colvin lost her sight in one eye during an ambush in Sri Lanka in 2001, but promised not to "hang up my flak jacket" and kept reporting on the world's most troubled places. She was matter of fact about the injury during the tribute at St. Bride's, as she described how authorities will try to keep the truth out of the headlines.

"I had gone to the northern Tamil area, from which journalists were banned, and found an unreported humanitarian disaster," she said. "As I was smuggled back across the internal border, a soldier launched a grenade at me and the shrapnel sliced into my face and chest. He knew what he was doing."

British Prime Minister David Cameron led the tributes to Colvin, telling lawmakers in the House of Commons that the death of the "talented and respected foreign correspondent" was "a desperately sad reminder of the risks journalists take to inform the world of what is happening and the dreadful events in Syria."

But the tributes also described a woman intent on living life to the full. She was often compared to pioneering war correspondent Martha Gellhorn -- gutsy and glamorous."She lived life passionately," said BBC correspondent Lyse Doucet. "Great shoes, great journalism."