The week after the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad fell from power I went to Baba Amr in Homs to see the place where Marie was killed. The rebel Media Centre where she had been staying, which was destroyed in the regime mortar attack that killed her and the French photographer, Remi Ochlik, has been rebuilt. I took a picture of the doorway where she breathed her last. I'm not sure why. Maybe I needed to get closer to that moment of loss.
After the regime retook control, most of the rebels and activists escaped. They were now returning. We watched as two hugged, reunited after more than a decade. Manhal Nader, who had survived the attack, said: “The Syrian people will never forget anyone’s sacrifice. We will never forget Marie nor anyone killed by Bashar al-Assad”.
Most of the women on the street had never left. Their husbands and sons had been killed fighting on the front line or “disappeared” by the regime. Ghabsha Khalaf, aged sixty-three, wept as she explained how she and her whole family had been tortured for providing food to the visiting foreign journalists. Assad’s thugs had hung her and her daughter by the arms in a prison interrogation room. They had beaten her on the head. I asked if she blamed Marie and the other journalists for what had happened to her. “No!”, she said. “Of course not. They were our guests and Marie was like a daughter to me.”
I began to cry. Marie once wrote, “It has always seemed to me that what I write about is humanity in extremis, pushed to the unendurable, and that it is important to tell people what really happens in wars.”
How exhilarating it is to witness people in fleeting moments of hope like this one in Syria. But such joy is tempered by suffering, and occasionally journalists are confronted with the unwitting role we may have played in the lives of those whose stories we tell.
