Two Western Journalists Killed in Syria Shelling

Two Western Journalists Killed in Syria Shelling

CAIRO — Two Western journalists, one American and one French, were killed early Wednesday as forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad pursued a deadly bombardment of the central city of Homs, according to activists and officials.

Valérie Pécresse, the French government spokeswoman, identified the dead as Marie Colvin, an American reporter working for The Sunday Times of London, and Rémi Ochlik, a French photographer.

The deaths were reported less than a week after Anthony Shadid, a correspondent for The New York Times, died of an apparent asthma attack on his way back to Turkey last Thursday after spending nearly a week reporting covertly inside Syria.

Video footage posted online showed what appeared to be two bodies lying face down in rubble inside a building identified in news reports as a makeshift media center in a beleaguered neighborhood of Homs, where rebels have been under sustained fire for almost three weeks. Three other Western journalists were injured in the attack, activists said.

One of them was identified in French media reports as Edith Bouvier, a 31-year-old woman freelancing for the daily newspaper, Le Figaro, which said she had been wounded in the legs. Video footage on YouTube showed her and Paul Conroy, a British freelance photographer working for The Sunday Times, both lying in what appeared to be a makeshift clinic with bandages on their legs.

The newspaper said initial reports suggested that Mr. Conroy was not seriously hurt.

According to his Web site, Mr. Ochlik, in his late twenties, had covered wars and upheaval in Haiti, Congo and the Middle East. Ms. Colvin, 55, was a veteran of many conflicts from the Middle East to Chechnya and from the Balkans to Iraq and Sri Lanka, where she lost an eye covering a civil war. She wore a distinctive black eyepatch. Both had won awards for their work.

Jon Snow, an anchor for Britain’s Channel 4 News, which interviewed Ms. 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 two-year-old child die in Homs. “ I watched a little baby die today. Absolutely horrific, just a two-year-old,” she said.

In an article published on Feb. 19 in The Sunday Times, Ms. Colvin described with 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. 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 the greatest. 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,” Ms. Colvin wrote.

“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,” she wrote.

Quoting a witness reached from neighboring Jordan, Reuters said the two journalists died when shells hit the house in which they were staying and a rocket hit them when they were escaping.

An activist who spoke in return for anonymity for fear of government reprisals said an apartment being used as a media center with satellite uplink facilities had taken a direct hit and activists had been unable to reach it to retrieve the bodies because of continued shelling.

The killings were reported as intense international lobbying for and against Mr. Assad continued on Tuesday over the nearly yearlong crackdown that has proved the most violent of the so-called Arab Spring and one of the most perilous for journalists trying to cover it.

The Syrian authorities do not routinely grant visas for reporters to enter the country and seek to control those who are given rare permission to do so. Unlike other violent uprisings in Libya or Yemen, those controls have combined to make the Syrian revolt difficult to observe first-hand and those reporters that do so run great risks of being caught in fighting, often in isolated pockets of rebel resistance.        Previous fatalities 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. Mazhar Tayyara, a freelance reporter for Agence France-Presse, The Guardian and other publications, died in Homs in early February.       

In addition to reporters from traditional media, the conflict throughout the Arab world has drawn in a generation of citizen journalists using cell phones, blogs and social media sites to spread word of their plight.

The deaths of the Western journalists reported on Wednesday followed by one day the death of Rami el Sayed, a well-known videoblogger in the Sunni Arab neighborhood of Baba Amr. 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.

“It’s too much of a coincidence,” said a Syrian activist in Cairo who has followed events closely. “There are reports of planes flying around and they may be looking for the satellite uplinks.”

Ms. Colvin left Beirut for Syria on Feb. 14, according to a colleague she dined with 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,” the colleague 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.”

Ms. 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.”

Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain paid tribute to her on Wednesday, saying her death was a reminder of the perils facing reporters covering “dreadful events” in Syria. 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.”

Rupert Murdoch,the owner of the Sunday Times, described Ms. Colvin as “one of the most outstanding foreign correspondents of her generation.”

In an email to his staff, Mr. Murdoch, the head of News Corporation, said Ms. Colvin “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. 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.”

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.

Homs has been an epicenter of the fighting in recent weeks, but government assaults were also reported on Tuesday in the Idlib area in the north and elsewhere. The day’s toll, as compiled by various groups that try to track the violence from inside and outside the country, ranged from the dozens upward.

At the same time, the faction of the opposition that is armed has claimed several more lives, according to the Syrian government, whose news agency reported the funerals of three soldiers killed in or near Damascus and in the central city of Hama.

The assault on Homs appeared to be a continuation of a government attack that began Feb. 4, after China and Russia vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning the violence and backing an Arab League plan for Mr. Assad to step aside. (Last week, in the strongest international rebuke to date, the General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to pass the same resolution in nonbinding form.)

A new group based in Cairo, the Activist News Association, has been collecting information from a network of “citizen journalist” contacts inside of Syria. Rami Jarrah, a Syrian activist who helped create the group, said that Syrian government and ground forces were massing outside of Homs. “Active resistance has long since stopped, but the government is using the excuse of ‘armed resistance,’ in quotes, to continue this bombardment,” Mr. Jarrah said. “They’re killing the democratic movement.”

Based on photographs of victims sent from inside Syria, he said, at least 79 deaths took place around the country on Tuesday, 46 of them in Homs, where shelling of Baba Amr was particularly heavy, and 33 in Idlib. That toll was likely to rise, he said.

Another exile activist group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, reported that in the northern city of Aleppo, unknown gunmen shot and killed Mohammad Ramadan, a businessman who supported the government. It also reported scattered protests and skirmishing in the capital, Damascus, where a group of youths raised an opposition flag at the Jaawzeh Bridge at the southern entrance of the capital.

Rod Nordland reported from Cairo, and Alan Cowell from London. Neil MacFarquhar and Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon, Fares Akram from Gaza, John F. Burns from London, and Steven Erlanger, Maïa de la Baume and Scott Sayare from Paris