When Britain finally lowered the flag in the Iraqi city of Basra in 2007, the army’s top brass valiantly claimed that they were leaving it to ‘self-rule’ rather than all-out anarchy. Despite the militiamen in the streets and the mortars in the skies, this was what success looked like in Iraq they told the invited press pack.
Nobody really believed them, of course; but only Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times could actually prove them wrong. Ignoring the ceremony invites, she donned an abaya and went into Basra to report unembedded, the first western correspondent to dare to do so in nearly two years. Her coverage on the 48 women murdered by death squads in the previous six months embarrassed the army’s top general into admitting that he ‘didn’t think it would end this way’.
It embarrassed me too. As chief foreign correspondent on the rival Sunday Telegraph, I too was in Basra at that time. And as Channel 4’s Lindsey Hilsum rather painfully reminds me in her new biography of Colvin, ‘while other British reporters were safely in the airbase watching the lowering of the Union Flag, Marie was inside the lawless city’. For her delighted editors at the Sunday Times, the risk was ‘worth it, as it always would be until something went wrong’.
It finally did go wrong for Colvin in the Syrian city of Homs in 2012 where, once again, the lady with the famous eyepatch had been the lone voice reporting the slaughter. Ironically, her death in a mortar attack made her far more celebrated than she’d ever been in life — not just among fellow women who admired her courage, but among people who’d never normally read the foreign sections.
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