Another patch wearer gone

Rod Nordland and Alan Cowell have the story in The New York Times:

Syrian security forces shelled the central city of Homs on Wednesday, the nineteenth day of a bombardment that activists say has claimed the lives of hundreds of trapped civilians in one of the deadliest campaigns in nearly a year of violent repression by the government of President Bashar al-Assad. Among the scores of people that activist groups reported killed by rockets and bombs through the day, two were Western journalists, the veteran American war correspondent Marie Colvin (photo), who had been working for The Sunday Times of London, and a young French photographer, Rémi Ochlik. The two had been working in a makeshift media center that was destroyed in the assault, raising suspicions that Syrian security forces might have identified its location by tracing satellite signals. Experts say that such tracking is possible with sophisticated equipment.
Activists, civilian journalists, and foreign correspondents who have snuck into Syria have infuriated the authorities and foiled the government’s efforts to control the coverage of clashes, which have claimed thousands of Syrian lives in the last year and which Assad portrays as caused by an armed insurgency.
Quoting a witness reached from neighboring Jordan, Reuters said the two journalists died after shells hit the house in which they were staying and a rocket hit them when they were trying to escape.
Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corporation and the owner of The Sunday Times, saluted Colvin as “one of the most outstanding foreign correspondents of her generation” and said in an email to the paper’s staff she “was a victim of a shell attack by the Syrian Army on a building that had been turned into an impromptu press center by the rebels. “Our photographer, Paul Conroy, was with her and is believed to have been injured,” he said. “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.”
Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain paid tribute to Colvin, saying her death was a reminder of the perils facing reporters covering “dreadful events” in Syria. A longtime war correspondent, she lost an eye covering the Sri Lankan civil war and wore a distinctive black eye patch.
Video posted online showed what appeared to be the foreign journalists’ bodies lying face down in rubble. Three other Western journalists were injured in the attack, activists said. The French prime minister, François Fillon, indentified one as Edith Bouvier, a 31-year-old freelancer for the daily newspaper, Le Figaro. Video on YouTube showed her and Conroy, an Irish freelance photographer who had been working with Colvin, lying in what appeared to be a makeshift clinic with bandages on their legs.
Reuters quoted a member of the advocacy group Avaaz as saying that Bouvier’s condition was precarious. “There is a high risk she will bleed to death without urgent medical attention," the advocate said. “We are desperately trying to get her out, doing all we can in extremely perilous circumstances."
A day earlier, a well-known video blogger in the Sunni Arab neighborhood of Baba Amr, Rami el-Sayed, was killed. Other citizen journalists in Homs have been killed recently in what activists interpret as part of a deliberate campaign to choke off news of the opposition.
The Syrian authorities rarely grant visas for foreign reporters to enter the country and seek to control those who are given permission to do so. Those controls have combined to make the Syrian revolt difficult to observe firsthand and reporters who do so run great risks of being caught in fighting, often in isolated pockets of rebel resistance.
Last week, Anthony Shadid, a correspondent for The New York Times, died of an apparent asthma attack in Syria after spending nearly a week reporting covertly in the northern area of Idlib, near the Turkish border.
Another activist group said that 27 young men had been killed the day before in that area. Reuters cited a statement from the Syrian Network for Human Rights as saying that most of the men, who were civilians, had been shot in the head or chest on Tuesday in several villages: Idita, Iblin, and Balshon in Idlib province near the border with Turkey.
“Military forces chased civilians in these villages, arrested them and killed them without hesitation,” Reuters quoted the organization in a statement. “They concentrated on male youths and whoever did not manage to escape was to be killed.”
Overall, the United Nations stopped tallying the death toll in the eleven-month uprising after it passed 5,400 in January, because it could no longer verify the numbers. Efforts by the Arab League and United Nations to stem the violence have so far had little traction, with Syria’s remaining allies— China, Iran, and Russia— continuing to stand by it.
But the latest deaths of journalists, on top of the agonizing civilian toll, focused a new wave of international revulsion and anger on Assad and the Syria government. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said the killings showed that “enough is enough, this regime must go. There is no reason why Syrians should not have the right to live their lives, to freely choose their destiny.”
The French foreign minister, Alain Juppé, also said in a statement that he had called on the Syrian government to order an immediate halt to the attacks on Homs and to respect its “humanitarian obligations”. He also said he was asking the French ambassador in Damascus to urge the Syrian authorities to open a secure access route into Homs to help victims of the bombardment with the support of the Red Cross.
The Russian president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, recently discussed the mounting violence with his Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, agreeing that the crisis must be resolved without foreign interference, the Kremlin announced on its website. The two called for an immediate ceasefire and the initiation of dialogue between the government and opposition without preconditions.
The statement said that the two leaders agreed that “the main task now, including for international organizations, particularly the United Nations, is to avert a civil war that could destabilize the entire region. Along these lines it is important to mobilize the efforts of all who are interested in ending the bloodshed and confrontation, and returning peace and stability to Syria.”
Medvedev also emphasized the inadmissibility of foreign intervention in Syria with Iraq’s president, Nuri al-Maliki.
The United Nations’ top relief coordinator, Valerie Amos, plans to visit Syria shortly to negotiate access for aid workers in the most devastated areas, the United Nations said, according to Reuters. The International Committee of the Red Cross has been trying to secure a brief cease-fire from the government in order to deliver food and medicine to trapped civilians, but so far, no agreement has been announced.
According to his website, Ochlik, in his late twenties, had covered wars and upheaval in Haiti, the Congo, and the Middle East. Colvin, 55, was a veteran of many conflicts from the Middle East to Chechnya and from the Balkans to Iraq and Sri Lanka. Both had won awards for their work.
Jon Snow, an anchor for Channel 4 News in Britain, which interviewed Colvin from Homs on Tuesday evening, called her “the most courageous journalist I ever knew and a wonderful reporter and writer.”
She was also interviewed by the BBC, recounting how she had watched a child die in Homs. “ I watched a little baby die today,” she said. “Absolutely horrific, just a two-year-old.”
In an article published on 19 February in The Sunday Times, Colvin described how she entered Homs “on a smugglers’ route, which I promised not to reveal, climbing over walls in the dark and slipping into muddy trenches. Arriving in the darkened city in the early hours, I was met by a welcoming party keen for foreign journalists to reveal the city’s plight to the world,” she wrote. “So desperate were they that they bundled me into an open truck and drove at speed with the headlights on, everyone standing in the back shouting Allahu akbar— God is great. Inevitably, the Syrian army opened fire. When everyone had calmed down I was driven in a small car, its lights off, along dark empty streets, the danger palpable. As we passed an open stretch of road, a Syrian Army unit fired on the car again with machine guns and launched a rocket-propelled grenade. The scale of human tragedy in the city is immense. The inhabitants are living in terror. Almost every family seems to have suffered the death or injury of a loved one.”
Colvin left Beirut, Lebanon, for Syria on 14 February, according to Neil MacFarquhar, a New York Times correspondent she dined with the night before her departure. Over dinner, she said: “I cannot remember any story where the security situation was potentially this bad, except maybe Chechnya.”
“Before I was apprehensive, but now I’m restless,” MacFarquhar recalled her saying, once details of her journey had been finalized. “I just want to get in there and get it over with and get out.”
Colvin was raised on Long Island, but had been based in England for many years. In a speech in 2010, Britain’s Press Association news agency reported, she spoke of the work of combat reporters, saying: “Our mission is to report these horrors of war with accuracy and without prejudice. We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story. What is bravery, and what is bravado?” She added: “Journalists covering combat shoulder great responsibilities and face difficult choices. Sometimes they pay the ultimate price.”
Other journalists who have been killed in Syria include a freelance cameraman, Ferzat Jarban, who was found dead in early November. Another freelance cameraman, Basil al-Sayed, died at the end of December. A French television reporter, Gilles Jacquier, died in January during a government-sponsored trip to Homs, and Mazhar Tayyara, a freelance reporter for Agence France-Presse, The Guardian, and other publications, died in Homs in early February.

Rico says he's sorry to see her go..