In Extremis: The Life and Death of the War Correspondent Marie Colvin

by Lindsey Hilsum

She was also there when a man turned up to confess to a crime that had remained unsolved since she was in Baghdad during the war twelve years earlier. Six hundred Kuwaitis had gone missing in that conflict. After their disappearance, the Kuwaiti government had offered a one-million-dollar reward for information that might reveal their fate. The man, whom she called Feras in her story to protect his identity, said that he had been a member of the Iraqi secret police and that the Kuwaiti citizens had been brought to the compound where he worked. Wearing the traditional Arab dishdashas, eyes blindfolded and hands tied behind their backs, they were prodded onto a firing range in two horseshoe-shaped groups. Senior military officials, including a half brother of Saddam Hussein, gave the order to fire. Feras said he had been the driver of one of the trucks that took the bodies to a secret police base near Fallujah. Three trenches were dug and the bodies thrown in. It was an extraordinary story. “But how were we to believe a man like Feras, who was expressing interest in a reward, in the new Iraq where people are so desperate for money?” pondered Marie. Then she had an idea—in the journalistic golden moment of anarchy after the invasion, you could do anything. So she rented a mechanical digger with operator. As they headed for the base where Feras had said the bodies were buried, she told him she would believe his story only if he could point out the graves. THE SUNDAY TIMES, NEA...