The deadliest country on earth for journalists

By Samuel Burke, CNN

Eighty thousand people have been killed in Syria’s grinding civil war; so too have scores of journalists, who have given their lives covering the carnage.

Among them, the legendary reporter Marie Colvin, who was killed telling us about the terrible plight of civilians during the siege of Homs last year.

Matching the pictures to Colvin's words was British photographer Paul Conroy. He was with her when she was killed, just hours after she called in one of her final reports to CNN. 

Paul Conroy now has written a very personal account of Marie's final assignment and final hours in his book, "Under the Wire."

“It was the story of Syria seen through the eyes of two people who look very low level,” Conroy told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Tuesday.

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“At night if you went out, then there would be little faces out of windows. And children would come out when the shelling stopped,” Conroy told Amanpour. “It's an existence that we got a tiny fragment of the life they lead, horrendously traumatic for women and children – anybody there. They existed in the shadows of night, between massive artillery, of bombardments.

The horrible irony is that the book focuses on a reporting assignment on the siege of the Syrian city of Homes. Now, as the book is released there has just been another bloody battle in Qusayr, near Homs.

In the video above you can watch Paul Conroy’s account of Marie Colvin’s final hours before she was killed in what he believes was a deliberate hit. Conroy also recounts the harrowing tale of how he escaped the attack and made it out of Syria alive.