Foreign correspondent Marie Colvin, an American who long worked for the British press, and Remi Ochlik, a French photographer, were killed in Homs, Syria on Wednesday by a mortar attack.
French officials have confirmed the deaths, which resulted from a governmental bombardment of Homs. That city, the third largest in Syria, has been one of the centers of the civic unrest gripping Syria.
While the United Nations has ceased counting the death toll, Local Coordination Committees, a Syrian activist group, has said more than 20 people were killed.
Ochlik, who had previously reported in Haiti and the Congo, recently won a World Press Photo award for his work.
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Colvin is considered one of the finest foreign correspondents of her generation, particularly in Britain.
The Guardian’s Peter Beaumont has already penned a eulogy of sorts, emphasizing Colvin’s temerity and resolve.
“When colleagues were discussing last week whether it was possible to reach the centre of the Syrian city, it was in the knowledge that Colvin was already there and trying to go further,” he wrote.
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Colvin was known for an eye patch covering her left eye, a remnant of her time in Sri Lanka, one of the countless war-torn regions she plunged into with aplomb.
She had just appeared on CNN’s “AC360,” Channel 4 News in Britain and the BBC, speaking to all of them from Homs.
The deaths come less than a week after Anthony Shadid, a Pulitzer-Prize winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times, died of an asthma attack while traveling between Syria and Turkey.
The death of Colvin, who had worked for the Sunday Times of the U.K. for the last two decades, promoted immediate recollections of Shadid.
“Marie Colvin seemed indestructible, she was brave and committed beyond words. Anthony…Marie…,” tweeted ABC and CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.
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These deaths, paired with Shadid’s, may also spawn further discussion of the situation in Syria, where the government has systematically repressed civilians for a year.
The Arab League had sent inspectors into the country and the UN Security Council already voted on a resolution condemning the violence and seeking the removal of Bashar Al-Assad. Both China and Russia vetoed it.
CNN's Piers Morgan, a former member of the British press, questioned media coverage and governmental reaction to the crisis in Syria.
“When will the World take action to stop this genocide in Syria? Marie said it was worst she'd ever seen. Are we just going to do nothing?,” he tweeted.
“Forget the politics about Syria – this is now a humanitarian disaster of huge proportions. We must act to save those poor people.”
Colvin’s last report was on casualties of shell-fire and other such attacks.