In the widows' basement

摘要

FIGHTING WARS has generally been seen as the concern of men-and so has writing about them. Yet at the height of the turmoil after the Arab spring, women covered all the region's conflicts, including for The Economist. Most female reporters do not want to be typecast, but might acknowledge that their gender influences their work, just as it does for men. It can help: women in the Middle East tend to be less visible at (for example) checkpoints, especially if they wear a headscarf. They can be welcomed into female-only domains. Male interviewees often open up to them. Marie Colvin, the roving war reporter for the Sunday Times from 1985 until her death in Syria in 2012, at the age of 55, thought female journalists distinguished themselves by focusing on people rather than the bang-bang. She got close to Muammar Qaddafi and Yasser Arafat, but, as this intimate biography by Lindsey Hil-sum, a fellow (female) reporter, shows, her gift was writing, passionately, about ordinary lives during war; "humanity in extremis", she called it. Her fateful last piece was on "the widows' basement" in Baba Amr, a district of Horns, where bereaved women and children huddled as Syrian forces starved and shelled them to death.