War Reporting Legend 'Marie Colvin' Killed in Syria

A celebrated American-born war reporter and a young French photographer were killed on Wednesday morning when Syrian forces bombed a makeshift media center in the besieged city of Homs. The tragedy shook the disparate community of conflict journalists gathered there, not least in highlighting the degree to which risks are intensifying for those covering Syria's march to civil war.

Marie Colvin, an American who was one of Britain's most honored combat journalists, and Rémi Ochlik, an award-winning photojournalist who was just 29, died when the regime's military hit the building where a growing number of foreign journalists were covering the Homs battle. British photographer Paul Conroy, whose work illustrated Colvin's chilling dispatch from Homs in the London Sunday Times last weekend, was reported severely injured, along with an unnamed American woman journalist. Those details have not yet been confirmed.

Within seconds of the news breaking on the BBC and Syrian Twitter feeds, the closed Facebook group for conflict journalists lit up with frenzied messages, many of them unable to believe that their colleagues were gone. And Colvin's own Facebook site was jammed with messages from friends, one saying, "Please God not Marie! Marie are you OK?"

She was not. Just one day before, Colvin had posted a message to the war-reporters' Facebook group, urging colleagues to break her newspaper's firewall and post her extraordinary report from inside Homs. With her characteristic passion and wry self-deprecating humor, she offered to "face the firing squad" for whoever illicitly reposted her work, while not forgetting to praise Conroy's "amazing photos" which accompanied it. "I don't often do this but it is sickening what is happening here," she wrote.

(Source: Vivienne Walt | Time.com)