"Why have we been abandoned by the world?"

In November 2010, The Sunday Times reporter Marie Colvin delivered a speech on the value of war reporting.
It has never been more dangerous to be a war correspondent, because the journalist in the combat zone has become a prime target, she said.
Accompanied by Paul Conroy, a British freelance photographer, Marie Colvin entered Syria clandestinely on February 14 in order to report on the tragic plight of the inhabitants of Homs.
I cannot remember any story where the security situation was potentially this bad, except maybe Chechnya… Before I was apprehensive, but now I’m restless. I just want to get in there and get it over with and get out, she told Neil MacFarquhar, of the NYT, the evening before her departure.
She felt she had to go, but dreaded doing so...
Yesterday, the building in the rebellious Homs neighborhood of Baba Amr, in which Marie Colvin and other journalists were working, was the target of an artillery barrage that lasted over two minutes.
As Colvin, and award-winning French photographer Rémi Ochlik, 28, were attempting to leave the battered building, they were hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and died instantly.
Paul Conroy and a French journalist writing for Le Figaro, Edith Bouvier were also wounded in the attack.
There is a high risk she will bleed to death without medical attention. We are desperately trying to get her out, doing all we can in extremely perilous circumstances, an activist told The Telegraph.
Suffering from a broken leg, Ms. Bouvier asked for help in leaving the country to seek medical assistance in a video posted today on YouTube.
The bodies of the fallen journalists are still in Homs. It is simply too dangerous to recover them and send them home.
There is no way to transfer the bodies. We don’t have morgues to keep the bodies, or ice, no electricity. After 24 hours, we will be obliged to bury them in Homs, Omar Shakir, a Homs activist, told the NYT.
The besieged town of Homs is surrounded by 5,000 Syrian troops poised to enter the city and crush the resistance concentrated in Baba Amr once and for all.
Fearing that such an onslaught was imminent, Marie Colvin had left Homs, only to return, the army finally staying put, Jean-Pierre Perrin, a reporter for the French daily Libération who had accompanied her, told his newspaper.
A total of nine people were killed in the attack on the building that housed a makeshift media center from which Colvin and her colleagues could file their work.
Overall, more than 60  people were killed in Baba Amr on Wednesday.
The Syrian government claimed not to be aware of the presence of foreign journalists in Homs, as they had not entered the country legally.
Furthermore, the regime indicated that the army had only targeted armed terrorist groups who have been terrifying citizens and attacking security forces and robbing public and private property.
In a television interview given just a few hours before her death, Marie Colvin painted an altogether different picture of the events taking place in Homs.
She also accused Mr. Assad’s forces of « murder » and said it was « a complete and utter lie that they are only targeting terrorists…the Syrian army is simply shelling a city of cold, starving civilians», wrote The Telegraph.
I watched a little baby die today, absolutely horrific, a two-year old-found the shrapnel had gone into the left chest and the doctor said « I can’t do anything », and his little tummy just kept heaving until he died. That is happening over and over and over, she told the BBC.
There are 28,000 people in Baba Amr. The Syrians will not let them out and are shelling all the civilian areas, she added.
The very next day, the media center was attacked and Marie Colvin was dead.
It’s too much of a coincidence. There are reports of planes flying around and they may be looking for the satellite uplinks, an activist exiled in Cairo, told the NYT.
Before the building was attacked, Syrian army officers were allegedly intercepted by intelligence staff in neighboring Lebanon discussing how they would claim journalists had been killed in crossfire with « terrorist groups », wrote The Telegraph.
The French journalist Jean-Pierre Perrin is convinced that the media center was not hit haphazardly.
If the media center is destroyed, then no more reports from Homs will reach us. It is Syrian army policy to kill every journalist setting foot on Syrian soil, he told Libération.
Indeed, the journalistic profession has paid dearly its determination to cover the bloody uprising.
Last November, Ferzat Jarban a freelance cameraman was killed covering the conflict, as was Basil al-Sayed, also a cameraman, late last year.
Last month, Gilles Jacquier, a French TV cameraman was killed in Homs while on an officially approved journey.
Earlier this month, Mazhar Tayyara, a freelance reporter was also killed in Homs.
In addition, just one week ago, the fine reporter Anthony Shadid of the NYT, died of an asthma attack while surreptitiously fleeing Syria.
The day before Colvin and Ochlik were killed, a renowned video blogger, Rami al-Sayed, also known as Syria Pioneer, died also in Homs..
Baba Amr is being exterminated. Do not tell me « our hearts are with you » because I know that. We need campaigns everywhere across the world and inside the country. People should protest in front of embassies and everywhere. Because in hours, there will be no more Baba Amr. And I expect this message to be my last, he wrote presciently, just before his death…
In spite of this campaign to staunch the flow of information emerging from Syria, and dissuade professional journalists from reporting inside the country, countless videos showing the regime’s brutal repression of the uprising are being posted daily.
This is the first YouTube war, Rami Jarrah, a director of an organization that collects and disseminates information originating in Syria, called the Activists News Association based in Cairo, told the NYT.
He estimates that 80% of the videos carried by mainstream TV news networks are produced by non-professionals, or citizen journalists.
Khaled Abu Salah, of the Revolution Leadership Council of Homs, shot a video with a cell phone camera that was posted on YouTube shortly after the attack on the media center.
Pointing in the direction of the bodies of the two journalists, he said we ask the EU to do something immediately. Your blood is now mixed with that of Syrians. So you need to act now and stop Assad’s thug.
On Wednesday, 104 videos depicting the preceding day’s violence were available online.
And there is much to report.
They call it the widows’ basement. Crammed amid makeshift beds and scattered belongings are frightened women and children trapped in the horror of Homs, the Syrian city shaken by two weeks of relentless bombardment.
Thus begins Marie Colvin’s last article, printed on February 19, in The Sunday Times.
It is a city of the cold and hungry, echoing to exploding shells and bursts of gunfire. There are no telephones and the electricity has been cut off. Few homes have diesel for the tin stoves they rely on for heat in the coldest winter that anyone can remember. Freezing rain fills potholes and snow drifts in through windows empty of glass. No shops are open, so families are sharing what they have with relatives and neighbors. Many of the dead and injured are those who risked foraging for food, she reported.
The scale of human tragedy in the city is immense. The inhabitants are living in terror. Almost every family seems to have suffered the death or injury of a loved one, she added.
Hadi al-Abdullah, a Homs activist, characterized the situation in the city as catastrophic.
Water has been cut off from Baba Amr. There’s no electricity, cooking oil or even bread. Many people are literally on the brink of starvation. People have fled their homes in fear of being bombed. They took refuge in a mosque, and there they were bombed too, he told Aljazeera.
It is no wonder that the Assad regime is targeting anyone and everyone brave enough to show the world how it treats its people…
What is pitiful, if not criminal, is the international community’s inability to stop the carnage.
Why have we been abandoned by the world, was a question on everyone’s lips, wrote Marie Colvin in her final piece.
It is a legitimate question that no diplomat, and particularly a Russian one, has cared to address directly.
Marie Colvin was an experienced war correspondent, having covered numerous conflicts in Sri Lanka, Chechnya and Libya, to name but a few.
She lost an eye in a grenade attack in Sri Lanka…
Telling the stories of those who bore the brunt of war demanded that reporters share their lot even if that meant putting oneself potentially in harm’s way…
That she knew, but was convinced that there was no other way of authentically telling the story.
And it was a story that had to be told.
Our mission is to report these horrors of war with accuracy and without prejudice. We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story. What is bravery, and what is bravado?…We go to remote war zones to report what is happening. The public have a right to know what our governments, and our armed forces, are doing in our name. Our mission is to speak the truth to power. We send home that first rough draft of history. We can and do make a difference in exposing the horrors of war and especially the atrocities that befall civilians, she said in the London lecture…
She gave her life to accomplish that mission, which is a noble one…
Yet, are we worthy of that sacrifice?
What have we and our leaders done with the harrowing reports she and others filed from Homs?
We are condemning the violence, naturally, but doing next to nothing to stop it.
That is not good enough…
Since the Russians are determined to prevent any meaningful action from being taken at the UN, the civilized world will have to act on its own.
We should start by officially repudiating the Assad regime and closing our embassies and expelling Syrian diplomat, as the Tunisians boldly did recently.
We could also provide all the support that we can, financial, moral and political, to the Syrian opposition, namely the Syrian National Council…
Finally, we may have to consider arming the Free Syrian Army since it now seems clear that only force can drive Assad from power…
Simply wringing our hands and lamenting the loss of innocent life and leaving it at that is an insult to all those who have died for the cause of  freedom and democracy in Syria…
(the photographs of Marie Colvin and Rémi Ochlik were found in Le Figaro)