The Independent's awardwinning war correspondent Kim Sengupta dies, aged 68

Kim Sengupta, the award-winning war correspondent who covered every major conflict of the last 30 years, has died at the age of 68.

- CHRIS STEVENSON

In a career spanning more than four decades – including spells as a reporter at the Daily Mail and Today – it was at The Independent that he would define his legacy as one of Britain’s best on-the-ground correspondents. The list of countries and conflicts he would file from included Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, the Balkans, Ukraine, Georgia, Kosovo, Mali, Sudan, Somalia, Kashmir, Israel, Gaza and Northern Ireland.

Kim’s ability to get those he came into contact with to open up ensured he had a contact book that was the envy of man. It also allowed him to work his way into places others could not reach, or out of any difficult situation he found himself in.

An example was in the Syrian civil war in 2012, when Kim was the only international reporter in the city of Aleppo when Bashar al-Assad’s forces began an offensive to clear the main opposition stronghold. His work from Syria would make him a finalist for the Orwell Prize for journalism the next year.

Syria was one of the countries that Kim would return to multiple times; others would be Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. Afghanistan, Ukraine and Gaza would occupy much of the last few years of his reporting, drawing on the experience he gathered over many years.

He was in eastern Ukraine watching as Russian special forces aided Moscow-backed separatists to seize territory, with Vladimir Putin eventually annexing Crimea. After years of low level conflict, Putin would eventually invade Ukraine in February 2022, with Kim again there to report on the human suffering as Kyiv’s forces pushed back the Russian assault. Across the last two years, Kim crisscrossed the country reporting on families and lives ripped apart by the invasion, travelling battle-scarred roads pock-marked by artillery, drone and missile strikes to give a voice to those Ukrainians fighting against Putin’s war.