A LIFE Not long after, Mr. Baali appeared in another clip, standing beside the body of a bearded man partly wrapped in a white shroud — his brother. Barely holding back tears, he stroked his brother’s face and kissed his head. “He’s lucky. He’s a martyr now,” Mr. Baali told a Times reporter at the time. In the spring of 2012, security forces detained his father, a former businessman, in an apparent effort to intimidate the son into abandoning his activism. His father was held in Harasta, a suburb of Damascus, in a branch office of the air force intelligence, feared by many activists. After he was released, rebels launched an attack on the branch. Mr. Baali was there to cover it. But the indiscriminate nature of the war hit home for Mr. Baali in April. A group of fighters he had come to trust with his own life fatally wounded his fiancée. They launched a barrage of mortar shells on an area of Damascus where she was staying at the time. Rebels have increasingly tried to hit the center of the capital with shells, which are by definition indiscriminate, and have periodically killed civilians, fueling resentment. A few days after his fiancée’s death, his zeal for describing the conflict, for a rare moment, faltered. “I almost died because I was in the same area that day,” he said haltingly. “I can’t continue the interview. I don’t know what to say.” About two months later, Mr. Baali was trying to cross from Qaboun to Jobar, another contested neighborhood, when he was hit by shrapnel from a mortar strike by government forces. He lingered in a hospital for weeks, finally slipping into a coma. On Friday evening, as news of his death emerged, social media buzzed with reminiscences from his friends and acquaintances. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the group based in Britain that documents the conflict, congratulated his family on his “great legacy.” Mr. Baali, it said, was “a brave young man who sacrificed his life to give voice to the pains of the Syrian people.”
Posted on: Sun, 07 Jul 2013 23:17:52 +0000
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