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Rescued Photographer: In Syria 'It's Not A War, It's A Massacre'

An image grab from a video uploaded on YouTube shows Paul Conroy in the Syrian city of Homs.
AFP/Getty Images
An image grab from a video uploaded on YouTube shows Paul Conroy in the Syrian city of Homs.

The British photographer who was rescued from Syria gave his first interview to Sky News today.

Paul Conroy, who was injured during the shelling of the Baba Amr neighborhood of Homs, said that what he saw in the city was a "massacre beyond measure."

"It's not a war, it's a massacre," he said. "An indiscriminate massacre of men, women and children."

It wasn't clear where Conroy, who works for The Sunday Times, was at the time of the interview, but appears that he was talking to Sky News from a hospital bed. (Update on March 3 at 2:10 p.m. ET. Our producer in London tells us Sky News and the BBC conducted their interviews "at his bedside in a central London hospital.")

"It's more than a catastrophe," he said. "It's snowing there now; people can't light fires.. In years to come, we're going to sit and we're going to go, 'How did we let this happen under our nose?"'

Conroy urged the international community to act or it will look at Syria the way it looks at Rwanda.

The people of Homs "need something to happen," he said. "It's not too late but it needs someone to step up to the mark and do something."

Sky News posted this video of the interview:

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Eyder Peralta is NPR's East Africa correspondent based in Nairobi, Kenya.