RIP Journalist Marie Colvin, Killed in Syria

Award-winning Sunday Times female journalist Marie Colvin was killed in the Syrian city of Homs yesterday when shells hit the house in the Baba Amr district of Homs in which she was staying and she was hit by a rocket attack when she tried to escape. French photographer Remi Ochlik was also killed in the attack.

Colvin was a well-respected American female war reporter known for her bravery and dedication to high-level reporting from inside war-torn and violent areas. I have a massive amount of respect for her work in a male-dominated and highly dangerous field, and am so inspired by the fact that she provided a great service to the world right up until the last days of her life. Marie Colvin’s last report from Homs, in which she describes “shelling with impunity and merciless disregard for the civilians who simply cannot escape” is online on the BBC website.

Listening to it is an eerie reminder of the courage with which she lived and died, and the importance of the world’s attention on the atrocities taking place in Syria. Colvin literally died trying to tell the world the truth about what’s happening there.

And that truth is pretty grim. But the least we can do is pay attention to the story she was murdered trying to tell. Innocent people are being murdered daily in Syria, and most of them are not happening under the watchful eye of the international community, to well-known Western women like Colvin. Yesterday U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that he was working urgently to find a special envoy for Syria after Russia signaled it would support such a move, despite having been one of two nations to vote against the assembly resolution and veto Security Council action on Syria (the other was China). Let’s hope this is the first of many urgent and effective interventions conducted by the international community to stop the violence and tragic murders of innocent civilians in Syria.