Middle East

Her dispatch in last week’s Sunday Times was as painful and brilliant a piece of war reporting as I have ever read. Her description of 300 people, huddled in a wood factory cellar known as “the widows’ basement” under constant bombardment was searing. Yesterday, speaking on Skype from the house in Baba Amr, the district of Homs where she was staying, she described watching a baby die. “This is the worst we’ve ever seen,” she told me. “And they’re getting away with it.”

In her last report, she described “climbing over walls in the dark and slipping into muddy trenches” to meet up with rebel fighters and activists to get to Homs. “So desperate were they that they bundled me into an open truck and drove at speed with with the headlights on, everyone standing in the back shouting “Allahu Akbar” – God is greatest. Inevitably, the Syrian army opened fire,” she wrote. The beginning of the next sentence made me laugh, because I could hear her voice saying it. “When everyone had calmed down….” I can see the scene now, with over-excited fighters making the situation worse, and Marie shouting “Calm down!”, terrified and laughing at the same time.

http://blogs.channel4.com/world-news-blog/my-friend-marie-colvin/20408