US court fines Syria president $300m for killing of journalist

A US court has ruled that Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s government is liable for at least $302.5 million in damages for its role in the 2012 death of renowned American journalist Marie Colvin who was covering the Syrian civil war for Britain’s Sunday Times.

US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that Colvin’s death in the besieged city of Homs constituted an “extrajudicial killing of a United States national”. The 56-year-old war correspondent was killed by a bomb that hit her makeshift broadcast studio, alongside French photographer Remi Ochlik.

In 2016, Colvin’s family accused officials in Assad’s government of deliberately targeting the building where Colvin and other reporters were living and working, in full knowledge that it was being used by foreign journalists.

Colvin’s family was represented by the San Francisco-based Centre for Justice and Accountability, which focuses on human rights litigation. The group’s Executive Director, Dixon Osburn, said the lawsuit was the first seeking to hold the Syrian government liable for war crimes and could pave the way for greater scrutiny of Al-Assad’s conduct.

“It’s the first [case] proving ground that the Assad regime has engaged in war crimes. He has engaged in a brutal set of crimes against humanity,” Osburn told reporters.

The lawsuit described the 2012 attack as part of a plan orchestrated at the highest levels of Assad’s government to silence local and international media “as part of its effort to crush political opposition”, in the early days of the Syrian uprising.

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Some of the evidence supporting the lawsuit was provided by two defectors from the Syrian regime, with an informant believed to have provided Syrian intelligence with the location of the media centre prior to the bombing. The judge added that there was even evidence to suggest that Syrian officials celebrated after the attack.

Colvin’s family is likely to face an uphill battle in recovering the damages owed. Speaking in 2016, President Al-Assad blamed Colvin for her own death, alleging the journalist worked with terror groups. “It’s a war and she came illegally to Syria, she worked with the terrorists, and because she came illegally, she’s responsible of everything that befell her,” Al-Assad said.

Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad [En.kremlin.ru]

However the US government has also been under scrutiny for its own role in targeting civilians and journalists in regional conflict zones. Last year, American journalist Bilal Abdul Kareem launched a lawsuit against the US government after it allegedly included him on a “Kill List”. He survived five drone assassination attempts by the US military, which killed several other civilians in the vicinity.

Washington is also under fire for its drone campaign in Yemen, which has killed thousands of civilians since it was initiated by US President Barak Obama. In 2015, a single air strike on a wedding convoy killed at least 131 people, in one of the deadliest attacks witnessed in Yemen’s war, drawing strong condemnation from the UN secretary-general. Drone strikes have increased six-fold under the Trump Administration, with recent statistics revealing that last year, of every three deaths caused by US air strikes, at least one was a civilian casualty.

 UN: 6,700 children were killed, injured in Yemen