Marie Colvin - The Woman Who Dared To Expose The Truth

As the film of The Sunday Times journalist Marie Colvins life and death A Private War premieres at the BFI London Film Festival this week, Anna Silverman speaks to her sister, who is determined to make sure she did not die in vain.

- Anna Silverman

IT’S BEEN SIX years since journalist Marie Colvin was killed when the makeshift media centre she was hiding in came under fire from government forces in Syria. Yet her sister, Cat Colvin, still finds herself picking up the phone to call her before stopping herself.

The last time they saw each other was at a Christmas family party in 2011. They gathered around a piano and belted out I Will Survive – the irony of which Cat can’t escape now.

Marie was a courageous war reporter who believed passionately in covering conflicts from the frontline – regularly infiltrating areas where no other journalist dared to tread; from the Balkans and Chechnya to Iraq and Afghanistan – and famously securing the first interview with then Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi during the Arab Spring.

She wanted to tell the stories of the victims of war and often took incredible risks on their behalf. She was following exactly this principle – uncovering the scale of death and destruction in Syria – when she was killed in Homs in 2012, at the age of 56.

‘I think of her every day,’ says Cat, over the phone from her home in Long Island. ‘There are so many things I want to tell her all the time; like when my daughter, who she was incredibly close to, got into Stanford University. We have three other siblings, but Marie and I were always very close.’

The day she died, she and photojournalist Paul Conroy had crawled through a 3km tunnel underneath thousands of troops, on a mission to enter the besieged city of Homs. As Assad’s army encircled the city above, they emerged to a sky illuminated with rocket fire and were smuggled to a house. But rockets closed in on them and eventually tore through the building where they were hiding, killing Marie and the French photojournalist Rémi Ochlik.