It’s a very chaotic room. But the baby’s death was just heartbreaking, possibly because he was so quiet... the doctor said there’s nothing we can do. We just watched this little boy, his little tummy heaving and heaving as he tried to breathe. It was horrific. My heart broke."
These were some of Marie Colvin’s final words to the world. On a cold evening in February 2012, huddled in a half-destroyed house in the besieged city of Homs, Syria, Colvin delivered her simmering final dispatch over Skype to CNN’s Anderson Cooper. Just seven hours later, the Sunday Times journalist was dead, killed in a rocket attack on the house she was working from.
A war correspondent for more than 25 years, Colvin saw more conflict zones than even the most battle-hardened general; Iran, Libya, Kosovo, East Timor, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, to name but a few. Driven by a desire to bear witness and speak truth to power, Colvin gave a voice to those who had none, often at great personal cost to herself. She lost her left eye in a grenade attack in Sri Lanka in 2001 and during an eight-day hike across a Chechen mountain pass, she braved hunger and exposure while fleeing Russian forces.
The story of Marie’s fatal final assignment in the embattled Baba Amr district of Homs, is told for the first time in a powerful new book by her photographer colleague and friend, Paul Conroy, who was also injured in the attack which killed Marie.
The title of the book, ‘Under the Wire’, alludes to Colvin and Conroy’s route into Syria which was not just under the wire, but underground. Smuggled into Syria by rebels from the Free Syrian Army (FSA), the journalists made their way into Baba Amr through a three-kilometer-long storm tunnel, which Conroy describes in his book as “crawling into your own waking nightmare.”
“Not even the smallest of us could stand upright in the tunnel… There was also the air. It was heating up rapidly as we drew further from the entrance and it was obviously less oxygenated… Muscles started to cramp due to our body positions and the lack of oxygen…
“We emerged gasping from the underground sarcophagus into a changed world. Explosion followed explosion, the earth shook and the sky flashed stroboscopic white… Our world had changed forever. There could be no return from this place.”
Colvin and Conroy had previously worked together during the siege of Misrata, Libya. Of all the conflicts they had both covered in their combined 35 years in war zones, Conroy says that they agreed that Misrata was the worst they’d ever seen, until they got to Homs:
“When we got into Homs and Baba Amr, it was just off the scale of what we’d seen before… In Baba Amr there was no option, everywhere was being shelled, there was nowhere that you would class as even remotely safe, because of the size and the amount of munitions being thrown in, there was no hiding place.
“(In Libya) there was always a safe zone, a fallback zone that wasn’t in the hands of the government, so you could pull back to Benghazi, regroup, get your mind together… whereas once we went into Syria, we were straight into enemy-controlled area and you’re right in the middle of it… there was no safe zone.
“We’d sleep at night knowing that Assad’s troops were a kilometer away and all the warning we were going to get was, ‘they’re coming.” And that was it, it was get out of the window and disappear into the olive groves.
“With Libya you could see a way forward, you could see what was going to happen.”
Conroy believes that it was Gaddafi’s notorious paranoia that ultimately contributed to his downfall:
“We went to an air force base, and the whole base had just 20 rounds of ammunition in it, to arm the guards, they weren’t even trusted with more than 20 rounds of ammunition, and every round was accounted for.”
With the Syrian Civil War dragging into its third year, it would appear that Assad’s forces — unlike Gaddafi’s — have no shortage of ammunition. Having spent six years in the British Army as an artillery man, Conroy knows munitions and was able to recognize the sheer scale of the military operation the rebels faced;
“…the levels of ammunition stocks that they had were just phenomenal. I could never really work out just how they kept them replenished in such a constant flow… most British artilleries, we could not have sustained that rate of fire with the stocks of ammunition that we carried - we just couldn’t do it…”
The Syrian regime has remained well-stocked thanks to numerous arms deals with Russia, and whilst there is overwhelming evidence to suggest that weapons have been used indiscriminately against civilians, Russian President Vladimir Putin has defended his decision to continue supplying the regime, arguing that it’s well within the bounds of international law. With Russian-made missiles raining down on Baba Amr, Conroy recalls how Putin was known locally as “The Butcher of Homs.”
Conroy now works alongside Amnesty International to campaign for tougher arms trade controls. In March 2012, just weeks after his harrowing escape from Syria, and the death of Colvin, he was asked to appear on a panel to discuss the arms trade in the House of Commons, alongside human rights activists and a representative from the Russian Federation.
“I didn’t know the protocol too well,” says Conroy. “So I said, ‘can I ask a person on the panel [the Russian representative] a question,’ and they said ‘yes’. I said, ‘iIt’s a three part question, with just yes or no answers… Are you aware that the Russia is supplying the Syrian regime with heavy weapons and munitions?’ and he said, ‘yes’. And I said, ‘are you aware that the Syrian regime is using heavy weapons and munitions against the Syrian people, civilians?’ And he said yes. ‘Does Russia have any intention in stopping the supply of heavy weapons and munitions to be used against the Syrian people?’ And he said ‘no.’ And he thought for a second and said, ‘if we don’t do it, someone else will’. It’s kind of what a drug dealer would say really.”
The situation in Syria is dire with evidence emerging lately of war crimes. Indeed, recent samples smuggled back from Syria to both Britain and France, tested positive for the Sarin - suggesting that the regime has deployed chemical weapons. A potent nerve agent, Sarin causes a violent and painful death. President Obama previously said that any use of chemical weapons by the regime would be a ‘game changer’. However, in an interview with the BBC, Conroy accused the west of hypocrisy.
He said: “It’s almost saying that for three years it’s kind of legitimate to use heavy explosives, battlefield weapons, missiles, rockets … on civilians, but please don’t use chemical weapons? Death is death whether it’s brought about by a red hot piece of shrapnel or a piece of gas … There’s no difference.
“It’s hypocritical at this point. The only reason that we’re involved now that chemical weapons have been found is that they might leave Syria and be used against us.”
Whilst Conroy’s book deals with the heaviest of topics he manages to interweave lighter moments and a certain gallows humour.
“Ninety percent of the time,” he explains, “apart from when tragedy strikes, it’s just funny. You look at yourself in these ridiculous situations and you have to laugh, thinking, ‘what the hell are we doing.’”
Indeed, Conroy and Colvin first met through one of those more ridiculous incidents. “Ah, the boat episode,” Conroy says with a mischievous laugh, “one of my finer moments.”
In the weeks before the Iraq war started in 2003, Conroy was one of 20 members of a western press corps waiting in a small town on the Syrian side of the Iraqi border, all desperate to get into northern Iraq to cover the allied forces invasion. Weeks went by as the group were repeatedly denied visas to cross the border, and their hopes began to fade.
“It was as I watched the lifeblood begin to drain from the journalists gathered in the Petroleum Hotel, that the idea of the boat was born.”
And so, with the innertubes of lorry tires, rope, wood and some netting, Conroy and two accomplices built a raft with which they hoped to sail down the Tigris River and into Iraq.
“The invasion of Iraq had already begun, and we knew we were taking a serious risk by travelling illegally into a fully-fledged war zone on a homemade boat.”
Unluckily (or perhaps the reverse), the vessel never set sail on her maiden journey, as Conroy and his co-conspirators were caught by Syria’s notorious Security Services.
Once released, Conroy was the pariah of the press corps who feared his nautical exploits had destroyed their chances of ever being allowed passage into Iraq.
“I skulked in my room, smoked and read the instruction manuals for my camera because I had no books … After two nights, I made a rare foray into the restaurant in search of anyone willing to talk to a pariah journalist. No luck. My presence was met with icy stares.
Suddenly, the restaurant door burst open and there stood Marie Colvin. She cast her head around the room and shouted to the gathered journalists, ‘Who and where is the boat builder?’ … ‘I am,’ I replied meekly. Marie strode over to my table and stuck out her hand. ‘Marie Colvin,’ she said in her inimitable American accent. ‘Good to finally meet someone with some balls round here. You like boats then, eh?’”
That night, a friendship was born that would later see them both go through hell.
“There was something about the two of us, it worked for us and it worked for the paper… half of the time we didn’t even need to speak, we’d just look at each other and give a little nod and it was like, ‘let’s go.’”
Conroy’s first taste of battlefield journalism was as a filmmaker in the Balkans during the late 1990s. Astonishingly, he describes the situation then as comparatively ‘easy.’
“In the Balkans days, it was quite easy really, to cross the front line, with just a carton of cigarettes or a bottle of scotch or the local hooch, you could generally talk your way through the front line. You certainly never felt that you were a target.
“Since Libya and the Arab spring, everyone is now so media aware... The information game has become a really big part of war… (in Libya) I would have never dreamt of trying to cross through the battle lines from rebel-held to government-held areas; the same in Syria.”
Indeed, Conroy and Colvin entered Syria fully aware that the Assad regime had allegedly issued orders that any western journalists caught should be shot on site, and their bodies tossed onto the battlefield, to make it appear they’d been caught in the cross-fire.
During his escape from Homs, an injured Conroy came painfully close to falling into the hands of the Syrian regime. With Marie dead, and a hole blasted through his leg, he spent six days lying in a makeshift field hospital in Baba Amr, under constant bombardment.
On the third day, the shelling suddenly stopped. A temporary cease-fire had been agreed, and Conroy was informed that ambulances from the Syrian Red Crescent (SRC) were making their way into the city of Homs to collect him, and the injured French journalist, Edith Bouvier.
Their brief euphoria was shattered, however, when an SRC Medic took Conroy to one side and confessed the real plan. He told Conroy: “At the checkpoint in Baba Amr, they have a state television crew. The idea is to film us being put into Red Cross ambulances and then, when we drive out of Homs … We are to be executed. Our bodies are to be put on the road and the government would then announce that the FSA ambushed us and murdered us.’”
With the SRC ambulances mere Trojan horses, Conroy had no choice but to flee to Lebanon through the storm-tunnel once more, aided by FSA rebels. The dramatic story of his escape is beyond even the most vivid of Hollywood scriptwriters’ imaginations; it makes “The Shawshank Redemption” look easy. There are times when the situation seems so dangerous, his health so precarious; you have to remind yourself that he survived to write the book.
In spite of everything he’s been through, Conroy insists that he would go back:
“I remember the night before Marie was killed. We sat there and the shelling was advancing and she just looked at me and said, ‘Paul, if you weren’t being paid, would you still be here?’ and I said ‘of course I would’
“I think at the heart of it for everyone that does that it, (is) the desire to tell stories, but stories that count… we just happen to tell the extreme stories of people with no voice, and without that presence, there just wouldn’t be the knowledge that this is happening.”
From the Street News Service, a news collaboration of the International Network of Street Papers.