The News Of …

The night before Marie Colvin was killed, she posted a message to her friends in a closed facebook group. It sent a chill down my spine – “Please post my Baba Amr, Homs story in February 19 issue. I don’t often do this, but it is sickening what is happening here. Cannot understand how the world can stand by and I should be hardened by now. Watched a baby die today. Shrapnel, doctors could do nothing. His little tummy just heaved and heaved until he stopped. Feeling helpless.”
Her words made me to reconsider my plans for the near future. Having just returned from Libya, I intended to go to Homs later, by the end of March at the earliest. Only her passionate account made me realize. I must go now. I sent her a brief message, inquiring about the latest intelligence of how to sneak in. This information she would never want me to share publicly, for the sake of those, who take these roads, but I might share her last words. “Bring warm clothes. It is freezing here. It is so cold.”
This morning I got another message, and it sent another hefty chill down my spine. “Something bad has happened to Marie. Still unconfirmed” – a Spanish journalist based in Beirut wrote. I didn’t want it to be true, but I knew, that this journalist would never share rumors. So I knew it was true, when I got another message from her half an hour later, saying: “Marie is dead, confirmed.”
On the last day of her life Marie would do her utmost to get her story out, to the widest public. Just hours before her death, she would give live interviews for international channels.
It might be the case that Marie Colvin and several other journalists were killed in a targeted strike. The safe house, where the journalists stayed in Homs had an obvious satellite link. Her death, as well as the death of the young French photographer Remi Ochlik, are sending out a clear warning: Covering Syria today is one of the most dangerous endeavors for war reporters. Even Marie pointed this out before her death. But not covering Syria must not be an option while the international community is sorting out its options of how to deal with this obvious massacre against the civilian population.

Marie Colvin.

Veteran Sunday Times correspondent Marie, 55 (famed for her piratical black eye patch) died with a French photographer in a rocket attack in the besieged city of Homs, where they were revealing sickening massacres of civilians.
She was at a media centre which came under fire yesterday morning.
Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad’s troops were accused of trying to silence a brave handful of foreign journalists defiantly exposing the horror.
The two-storey house attacked was next to a hospital in the Baba Amr district of Homs. It was well known to be a media base.
Sunday Times photographer Paul Conroy was among at least three foreign journalists injured in the onslaught, which is believed to have left at least 26 people dead.
French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand said Marie and dead photographer Remi Ochlik (28) were “targeted and tried to flee the bombardment”.
French journalist Jean-Pierre Perin (who was with Marie in Homs last week) said they were tipped-off the Syrian Army was going to shell the media centre.
He said they were told to leave Homs and warned – “If they find you, they will kill you.” But Marie then went back, determined to alert the world to Assad’s crimes.
Perin said troops were “fully aware” that the press building was being used to expose the murder of women and children.
Radio messages ordering soldiers to target the press centre had been intercepted.
If journalists died, the cover story was to be that they were caught in clashes with “terrorist groups”.
Opposition activist Abu Abdu al-Homsi said the Syrian Army was bombing any buildings from where satellite phone signals were detected.
Eyewitness Abu Bakr told how he tried to retrieve Marie and Ochlik’s bodies from the rubble. But he said – “We can’t get them out because of the shelling.”

Syrian gunners have pounded an opposition stronghold where the last dispatches from a veteran American-born war correspondent chronicled the suffering of civilians caught in the relentless shelling, just hours before an intense morning barrage killed her and a French photojournalist.
Their deaths were two of 74 reported Wednesday in Syria.
“I watched a little baby die today” – Marie Colvin told the BBC from the embattled city of Homs on Tuesday in one of her final reports.
“Absolutely horrific, a two-year old child had been hit” – added Ms Colvin, who worked for Britain’s Sunday Times. “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.”
Colvin and photographer Remi Ochlik were among a group of journalists who had crossed into Syria and were sharing accommodations with activists, raising speculation that government forces targeted the makeshift media center, although opposition groups had previously described the shelling as indiscriminate. At least two other Western journalists were wounded.
Hundreds of people have died in weeks of siege-style attacks on Homs that have come to symbolize the desperation and defiance of the nearly year-old uprising against President Bashar Assad.
The Syrian military appears to be stepping up assaults to block the opposition from gaining further ground and political credibility with the West and Arab allies. On Wednesday, helicopter gunships reportedly strafed mountain villages that shelter the rebel Free Syrian Army, and soldiers staged door-to-door raids in Damascus, among other attacks.
The bloodshed and crackdowns brought some of the most galvanizing calls for the end of Assad’s rule.
“That’s enough now. The regime must go” – said French President Nicolas Sarkozy after his government confirmed the deaths of Colvin, 56, and Ochlik, 28.
The US and other countries have begun to cautiously examine possible military aid to the rebels. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton heads to Tunisia for a meeting Friday of more than 70 nations to look at ways to assist Assad’s opponents, which now include hundreds of defected military officers and soldiers.
“This tragic incident is another example of the shameless brutality of the Assad regime” – US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said of the killing of the journalists.