The Sky News journalist Alex Crawford and her camera crew have been deliberately targeted by the Syrian government and repeatedly shot at while reporting on the regime’s assault on the province of Idlib.
Crawford said she and the other four people in her team came under intense bombardment on Thursday when a Syrian military drone spotted them in the town of al-Habit. The area in the Idlib countryside is in a buffer zone between opposition and government forces and is meant to be battle-free.
Dramatic video footage showed the journalists under attack. Crawford said they had been filming a burning armoured vehicle when a bullet hit it. “We had suddenly become the new targets,” she wrote.
“We all withdrew and ran for cover, trying to pick our way back through the broken and busted buildings all around us.”
Crawford added: “The military drone hovered above us and we could hear the sound of an aircraft homing in.
“As we hid in a partial doorway to try to avoid running straight down an open road exposing ourselves, the first shell came in.”
Crawford, her Sky producer Martin Vowles, and two Syrian activists then began running through clouds of dust and thick smoke, in an attempt to take cover and to get back to their car. “Go, go, go,” Vowles shouted.
“We were spotted by a military drone and then repeatedly shot at with what we believe were 125mm shells probably fired from a T-72 Russian battle tank,” Crawford said. “As we retreated to leave the area, the targeting of us continued.”
The attack on the crew was a clear violation of international standards. One of the Sky team had “press” written on his flak jacket. Crawford said she was wearing a black abaya “to observe cultural sensitivities” during Ramadan.
All civilians had already fled the area, she said.
One of the civilian activists Bilal Abdul Kareem, a New Yorker who moved to Syria three years ago, was hit by shrapnel in the side of his chest. As the team drove off another shell came in behind them, Crawford said.
They reached the abandoned town of Kahn Shaykhun, where Kareem went to hospital and the journalists kept moving. Another shell hit the town soon afterwards.
About 700,000 people have fled the Idlib region after relentless attacks over recent weeks by regime forces backed by Russian air power.
Crawford said the 9-mile (15km) demilitarised zone between the rebel and regime lines had been repeatedly breached.
Earlier this year the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad was held liable by a US court for the extrajudicial killing of the Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin and ordered to pay $300m (£228m) in punitive damages.
In the judgment the Syrian government was found to have deliberately targeted journalists during the civil war in order to “intimidate newsgathering” and suppress dissent.
Colvin, an American reporter who operated out of London, and Rémi Ochlik, a French photojournalist, were killed in a rocket attack on a makeshift media centre in the rebel-held city of Homs in February 2012.