Two Western Journalists Killed in Syria
Two Western journalists were killed Wednesday, amid a deadly government crackdown in the Syrian city of Homs.
The victims were identified as American Marie Colvin, a reporter for The Sunday Times of London, and Rémi Ochlik, a French photographer.
Colvin, 55, was a veteran war correspondent, who had reported from conflict zones around the world. She lost her left eye to shrapnel a decade ago, while reporting in Sri Lanka, and has worn an eye patch ever since. In an effort to avoid government controls on journalists, Colvin had entered Syria via a “smugglers’ route, she wrote in a Sunday Times article, February 19. (Watch Colvin’s final interview, given hours before she died.)
A photojournalist in his late 20s, Olchik had covered the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2008, the cholera epidemic in Haiti in 2010, and the Libyan uprising in 2011, his professional website says.
According to estimates, some 9,000 people have been killed in Syria as a result of government efforts to crush 11 months of anti-government protests.
The deaths of Colvin and Olchik came five days after Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Anthony Shadid, 53, of The New York Times, died of an asthma attack, as he was attempting to cross into Turkey from Syria.
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