The horrors we saw got worse and worse... we hoped that by showing them to the world we could help bring peace but that’s a long way off
Trapped in the blood-soaked Syrian rubble surrounded by dead bodies, Paul Conroy screamed out that he was dying, too. He clutched his mangled leg in despair after seeing his longtime friend and colleague killed beside him.
Marie Colvin, the renowned war correspondent, had lost an eye to a grenade in Sri Lanka in 2001, but this time braving another frontline cost her her life.
War photographer Paul and Marie had been targeted in an airstrike orchestrated by the hated regime of Bashar al-Assad on February 22, 2012.
After Paul stemmed the blood gushing out of his leg, his thoughts turned to how he could escape the besieged city of Homs alive.
But his risky route into the battleground, a mile-long airless storm drain buried deep under the Syrian border, had been destroyed by a bomb just moments earlier.
Then, the lights of an aid ambulance flickered through the window of the destroyed building, gave him a fleeting moment of hope. “Do not get in that ambulance,” a Free Syrian Army rebel whispered in his ear.
It was Assad forces in disguise, he was told, here to finish the job.
But somehow he did manage to break free from the frontline after five days holed up in the ruined district of Baba Amr.
Now, seven years on, his incredible story features in a star-studded blockbuster.
A Private War has down-to-earth Liverpudlian Paul, 54, played by heart-throb Jamie Dornan.
Marie is played by Brit Rosamund Pike, whom Paul affectionately calls “Ros”, in an unflinching performance already being tipped for an Oscar.
The film focuses most of all on the story of Marie, who was 56 when she died.
Paul, a former soldier with the Royal Artillery, and Marie made a formidable duo. They had smuggled themselves into Syria to “bear witness” to the slaughter and tell the world the extent of tragedy Assad was, and still is, inflicting on his people. No wonder the regime wanted them dead.
Paul explains: “People always say, ‘What got you through it?’,” he remembers. “When I was struggling, I thought of everyone back home, my kids, but for the most part I had to just focus on survival.
“Maybe it’s my Army training, but in my head it was just Plan A, then Plan B.
“When that ambulance left after the shelling, which the rebels told me not to get into, I lay there in the darkness and lit a cigarette and I was at Plan W.
“It felt like the whole world had collapsed in. So I just tried to focus on the next 10 minutes and then the next hour.”
His escape from the hell of Homs is nothing short of extraordinary.
When the scene was clear of suspected government-backed forces ready to kill Paul, rebels dragged him to a field hospital. His life-threatening wound, cleaned with iodine and a toothbrush, was stitched with an office stapler.
He was evacuated in an operation which left 13 others dead and spent three days riding on a motorbike through a blizzard of shells before reaching the Lebanese border.
Jamie, 36, may be best-known for playing billionaire sadomasochist Christian Grey, but Jamie was the perfect choice to play him, says Paul.
He remembers him from his acclaimed role as a Belfast serial killer in The Fall. “He was amazing in that,” smiles Paul, his gentle Scouse twang still distinctive. “It was really good with Jamie because when someone is playing you it is a bit like, ‘Well I don’t do that’. So I just said, ‘Let’s go to the bar’. After a few days it was, ‘Yes, you’ve got me’. We’ve become good friends.” Paul, who laughs a lot considering what he has been through, went on: “I was a bit scared of doing a film because it was Marie’s legacy. There was so much to think about. “But I met Ros and she was just so dedicated to getting it right, it only took me an hour to go from feeling a bit nervous to, ‘Yes, I’ll do it’.”
As the main consultant on the film, Paul worked very closely with Jamie and Rosamund on location in Jordan and London, where Marie was based, joking: “I was only supposed to stay for a week; I ended up staying on set for the whole film.” Marie, a middle-class American Fleet Street icon, known for her hard-drinking and straight-talking, suffered from PTSD, an issue explored heavily in A Private War.
Two years after losing an eye in the civil war in Sri Lanka, she reported on a mass grave of Saddam Hussein’s victims being dug up in front hysterical relatives in Iraq.
Paul was alongside her. It was the first time they had worked together and the start of a powerful, if unlikely, pairing chasing stories which made the world sit up.
Paul sees sharing the horror he saw with Marie in Syria as his way of coming to terms with the unspeakable things he witnessed.
Within moments of arriving at the front, he met a mother screaming: “Help my baby, help my baby!”
Paul looked at the bundle in her arms, and it was clear the child was long dead. Paul shakes his head in disbelief: “The woman had been driven insane by the relentless shelling and death.
“And it all got worse and worse. But the thought we could was change that what was about to happen. if we could show the world,
“I have thousands of images of dying and dead children, but occasionally one really happening.” brings home what is
Tragically for Paul, and the hundreds of thousands of innocents killed in Syria, his work did not change what was about to happen and the war rages on.
Paul lets out a sigh: “People sometimes ask me what I
would say to Marie if she were still here.. I would sit her down and get her a very large whisky and say, ‘Marie, it’s still going on.’ It would be [ what] I ‘d find hardest to tell her.” It is not clear for Paul what he will do next and how, or if, he will be able to move ons. But he is determined to go back to Syria, where he feels he has unfinished business. He hopes to work with French journalist Edith Bouvier who also survived the attack on the makeshift media centre. French photographer Rémi Ochlik was killed alongside Marie. Paul spent months in hospital and had 23 operations on
his leg, which he says is now “not too bad”. He then threw himself into writing a book about his experiences, Under the Wire, which became a documentary.
He says. “Without the people of Homs getting me out, without a shadow of a doubt I would be dead. I owe them a huge debt.
“I hope I am paying it back in part by telling their story. Nothing would give me more pleasure than to see them in peace, but that’s a long way off.”
However Paul, a dad to three boys, admits that when he saw the scenes being filmed, he was thinking, “I really miss this”. He adds: “I can’t wait to get back into the field.”
■ A Private War is in UK cinemas now.
■ Under the Wire, by Paul Conroy, is published by Quercus.
Without the people getting me out I would be dead PAUL CONROY ON HIS DEBT TO THE REBELS