Street roots
June 21, 2013
A member o f the Free Syrian Arm y holds his weapon as he sits on a sofa in the middle o f a street in Deir al-Zor April 2, 2013.
Described as the “greatest war correspondent o f her generation, ” Marie Colvin was killed in Syria in 2012.
Under the Wire is photographer Paul Conroy’s gripping account of the year spent on assignment with her.
BY A M Y M ACKINNON
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
t’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,
I
“Under the Wire:
Marie Colvin’s
Final Assignment”
by Paul Conroy.
Published In the
UK by Quercus
and set for U.S.
release by Perseus
Books on Oct. 7.
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
See W ITNESS, page 9