Bearing Witness: the Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin
By Elodie Barnes | On March 18, 2025 | Comments (0)
Marie Colvin (January 12, 1956 – February 22, 2012) was an American journalist known for her intimate, storytelling reporting style covering conflicts worldwide.
She was best known for her coverage of the Middle East (as well as for her trademark black eyepatch, worn after losing her left eye in Sri Lanka). She died while covering the conflict in Syria in 2012, and the Syrian government has since been held responsible for her death.
Early life and education
Marie Catherine Colvin was born in Astoria, Queens, the eldest of five children. She was raised in the affluent Oyster Bay area, Her parents, Bill and Rosemarie, were both high school teachers. Bill was passionate about literature and Democratic politics and passed both passions on to Marie.
Marie studied anthropology at Yale, and during her four years there she “changed from a regular science major to a science major who only takes English courses (there was no time to change majors).”
She took a class with writer and journalist John Hersey, one of the first practitioners of “New Journalism” — in which storytelling techniques are applied to reporting. She was inspired to begin writing for the Yale Daily News and realized this was her calling.
Beginning a career of global reporting
After graduating in 1978, Marie began working as an editor for the newsletter for Teamsters Local 237 in New York City, then moved to a staff reporter position for United Press International in Trenton, New Jersey. In 1984 UPI had named her Paris Bureau Chief. She was responsible for the international news desk, which gave her the opportunity to cover the Middle East, a region that fascinated her.
Marie was determined to cover the possible outbreak of war in Libya in 1986. New York Times reporter Judith Miller told her to “Just go … Qaddafi is crazy, and he will like you.” She went, and indeed, he liked her; she was summoned to his private chambers.
“It was midnight,” she wrote, “when Col. Muammar Gadhafi, the man the world loves to hate, walked into the small underground room in a red silk shirt, baggy white silk pants, and a gold cape tied at his neck.” She recalled that he had introduced himself, “I am Qaddafi,” and she had responded, “No kidding,” before spending the rest of the night fending off his advances.
It was the first of dozens of interviews she conducted throughout her career with heads of state, world leaders and rebel leaders. These included Yasser Arafat, on whom she wrote and produced a BBC documentary based on over twenty personal interviews. She also accompanied him to the White House when peace talks were being conducted with Yitzhak Rabin. During the 1993 Oslo peace accords she reportedly told him, “Just put the pencil down and sign it already.”
. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . .
In extremis: reporting for the Sunday Times
Marie moved to The Sunday Times in London in 1986 and reported on conflicts all over the world, including East Timor, the Balkans, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Chechnya. She continued to report on the Middle East and covered the Iran–Iraq war in the 1980s, both Gulf Wars, and the Arab Spring of 2011.
She became recognized for her intimate writing style, avoiding the dominant macho language and image of war reporting. She focused instead on the horrific human cost of every conflict. “My job,” she said, “is to bear witness. I have never been interested in knowing what make of plane just bombed a village.” She won several awards, including the Courage in Journalism Award, the British Press Award, and the Foreign Press International’s Journalist of the Year Award.
Publicly, she wasn’t a fan of feminism, quoting her heroine Martha Gellhorn: “Feminists nark me.” In private, however, she was aware that more was demanded of her than of her male colleagues. On the subject of female journalists, she wrote, “Maybe we feel the need to test ourselves more, to see how much we can take and survive.”
While on assignment, her determination to “go in bare and eat what they eat, drink what they drink, sleep where they sleep” often led her to take extreme risks. She went where other journalists would not, and stayed when others left, driven by the knowledge 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…”
This drive was demonstrated in 1999 in East Timor when Marie and two female Dutch journalists chose to stay in a besieged UN compound with hundreds of refugees who were fleeing Indonesian-backed militia forces. UN staff and other journalists (mostly male) were evacuated, leading to Marie’s wry comment that, “They don’t make men like they used to.”
Marie’s determination to stay saved the lives of those refugees when the UN, embarrassed by her powerful reports, returned to the compound to evacuate them. A front-page headline read, “Her courage saved 1,500.”
Photographer Paul Conroy (one of the few photographers she was happy to work with and who was with her in Syria when she died) said of her bravery,
“People called her fearless, but they are absolutely wrong. She was terrified. Her bravery came from going back in even though she was terrified. That’s completely different from being fearless. It was just that curiosity overtook any sense of staying alive.”
Paying the price: PTSD
Marie did not emerge unscathed from so many war zones. In 2001, while covering an upsurge of violence in the Sri Lankan civil war, she lost her left eye in a rocket-propelled grenade attack. She had already seen more combat than most soldiers; the trauma of the injury triggered the full-blown PTSD that she struggled with for the rest of her life.
At her worst times – often back home in London, where there was nothing to distract her from paranoia, panic attacks, and nightmares – she would disappear for days.
After Marie’s death, friends and colleagues recalled her long nights of partying and drinking, but the reality was a serious alcohol problem that she never quite mastered. Pressured by friends and family, she eventually sought help for PTSD, though she said, “I have no intention of not drinking, [but] I never drink when I am covering a war.”
In extremis II: personal life
Marie’s personal life was tumultuous. Not long after joining the Sunday Times she met her first husband, Patrick Bishop. A diplomatic correspondent, he was in Iraq at the same time as Marie to cover the Iran–Iraq war. He recalled wanting to impress her with his knowledge of artillery and the difference between incoming and outgoing fire.
“I explained that the bang we had just heard was outgoing and therefore nothing to worry about. Then there was another explosion. ‘And that one,’ I said, ‘is incoming!’ and threw myself headlong onto the ground. As the shell exploded some distance away, I looked up to see the woman I had been trying to show off to, gazing down at me with pity and amusement.”
They married in August 1989 but Bishop was unfaithful, and the marriage quickly dissolved. After their divorce, Marie married Bolivian journalist Juan Carlos Gumucio in 1996. This time she suffered two miscarriages, and Gumucio proved to be violent and an alcoholic. They divorced, and he took his own life in 2002.
In 1999, Marie reunited with Bishop while covering the conflict in Kosovo, but the relationship didn’t last any longer the second time around. In 2003, she met Richard Flaye, a divorced company director, and was soon introducing him as “the love of my life.” They shared a passion for ocean sailing, and Flaye seemed to give Marie the kind of stability she’d never experienced. Their relationship lasted on and off until Marie’s death in 2012.
The last assignment: Syria, 2012
With her characteristic drive to report on the brutality of war, Marie was determined to cover the hostilities that began in Syria in 2011. Along with photographer Paul Conroy, she crossed into the city of Homs in February 2012, ignoring the Syrian government’s attempts to prevent journalists from covering the conflict. Homs was under direct attack from the Syrian army and foreign reporters were banned.
Along with other foreign journalists who had also made it in, Marie filed her reports from a makeshift media center surrounded by bombed-out buildings. Homs, she wrote, was: “
… the symbol of the revolt, a ghost town, echoing with the sound of shelling and the crack of sniper fire, the odd car careening down the street at speed. Hope to get to a conference hall basement where 300 women and children are living in the cold and dark. Candles, one baby born this week without medical care, little food.”
Marie and Paul left Homs after a few days when the situation rapidly deteriorated, but Marie was determined to return. This time, there was no space for them to carry video equipment, flak jackets, or helmets, and the Syrian army was under orders to kill any journalists found near the besieged area. They had to crawl for hours through a frigid tunnel from outside of the city. Even in such dire circumstances, though, Marie did not lose her sense of humor: she emailed Flaye that night, saying,
“You would have laughed. I had to climb over two stone walls tonight, and had trouble with the second (six feet) so a rebel made a cat’s cradle of his two hands and said, ‘Step here and I will give you a lift up.’ Except he thought I was much heavier than I am, so when he ‘lifted’ my foot, he launched me right over the wall and I landed on my head in the mud!”
Back at the media center, there were few journalists left. In an interview with CNN broadcast the night before she died, Marie said, “It’s a complete and utter lie they’re only going after terrorists. The Syrian Army is simply shelling a city of cold, starving civilians.”
Marie was killed on February 22, when direct rocket fire hit the media center. French photographer Rémi Ochlik also died in the attack, while Conroy – along with Syrian translator Wael al-Omar and French journalist Edith Bouvier – was severely injured.
The aftermath of Marie Colvin’s death
Marie’s death triggered an outpouring of tributes from friends and colleagues around the world. Questions were raised as to why she went back into Homs when it was so clearly too dangerous. There was a huge backlash against the Sunday Times for “allowing” her to continue in Syria.
According to Vanity Fair journalist Marie Brenner, there was “rage” among foreign staff members at the paper at “what they considered the danger they now faced in the paper’s frenzy for press awards.”
Concerns were also raised about Marie’s mental state and the level of support she had received from her superiors. However, as Marie’s executor, Jane Wellesley, pointed out, “If the Sunday Times had not allowed Marie to continue the work she loved, it would have destroyed her.”
In 2016, a civil suit was filed against the Syrian government by Marie’s family. Three years later, a US court found that the government, led by Bashar al-Assad, was responsible for Marie’s death: Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that it had been an “extrajudicial killing” and ordered Damascus to pay over $300 million in damages for the “unconscionable crime.”
Later, the Marie Colvin Memorial Foundation was established at Stony Brook University to honor Marie’s legacy of supporting victims of conflict and the journalists who report on it. The foundation focuses on education, aid, and raising global awareness of conflict.
. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . .
A Private War and Marie Colvin’s Legacy
In 2018, two films and a biography were released about Marie’s life. A Private War is perhaps the best-known. Starring Rosamund Pike as Marie and with Paul Conroy as a consultant, it received positive reviews from critics as well as Marie’s family and friends.
The level of realistic detail in the film was remarkable. Director Matthew Heineman was also a documentary film maker, and ensured that all the extras cast had actually lived through the events being recreated: they were Syrians who had been shelled in a basement in Homs, they were Libyans who had been shaken by the traumas of war.
A documentary film called Under the Wire was also produced, based on Paul Conroy’s memoir about his time with Marie, and Syria in particular.
A biography titled In Extremis: The Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin was written by her longtime friend and colleague Lindsay Hilsum, International Editor for Channel 4 News in the UK. Based on hundreds of interviews with Marie’s family, friends, and other colleagues, as well as Marie’s extensive private journals going back to her childhood, it was a remarkably rounded biography. It won the 2019 James Tait Black Award as well as being shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award.
Hilsum later said, “Part of me thinks Marie is looking down saying, ‘Hey, what’s all the fuss, this is what we do’. But I also think she would be glad that people were talking about Homs again, and hope that maybe some of the attention would be focused on Yemen and other under-reported conflicts and the people suffering in them.”
Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is a writer and editor with a serious case of wanderlust. Her short fiction has been widely published online and is included in the Best Small Fictions 2022 Anthology published by Sonder Press. She is Books & Creative Writing Editor at Lucy Writers Platform, she is also co-facilitating What the Water Gave Us, an Arts Council England-funded anthology of emerging women writers from migrant backgrounds. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, and when not writing can usually be found planning the next trip abroad, or daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Find more of her writings here and on Literary Ladies Guide.
. . . . . . . . .
Further reading
- In Extremis: The Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin by Lindsay Hilsum, 2018
- A Private War: Marie Colvin and Other Tales of Heroes, Scoundrels and Renegades by Marie Brenner, 2019
- On the Front Line: The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin by Marie Colvin, 2012
Leave a Reply