Reuters Gave This Kid a Camera — Now He's Dead

From David Kenner, at Foreign Policy, "The Controversial Death of a Teenage Stringer":

BEIRUT — On Dec. 20, 2013, Molhem Barakat took his last picture of the Syrian war. He had been photographing a battle for control of Aleppo's al-Kindi Hospital when he was killed along with his older brother Mustafa, a fighter in a local rebel brigade.
Barakat's cameras, apparently provided to him by the news agency Reuters, were photographed covered in blood in the aftermath of the attack.

Barakat was just 18 when he died, but his images -- transmitted through the Reuters photo service -- gave people across the globe a glimpse into his world, and his country's war. But while his precocious work appeared everywhere from the New York Times to Foreign Policy, his online presence served as a reminder that he was still a teenager. His last tweet brags about unlocking a new level in a computer racing game; his Facebook account is full of smiling selfies.

"I was there the moment he grabbed the first camera -- I still remember it. It was a Sony HD Handycam, and he was just so good with it," said Adnan Haddad, a Syrian activist currently in Gaziantep, Turkey, who first enlisted Barakat to work in the pro-uprising Aleppo Media Center in the winter of 2012. "He's a big loss. He was a young guy, a smart one, a very fast learner, and losing him like this -- for the sake of making a few hundred dollars -- is not worth it."

Man, the dolts at Reuters are f-ked up. These are the same idiots who embedded with Iraqi insurgents, and who were subsequently blown away in a U.S. Apache attack --- the one WikiLeaks first attempted to foist off as a war crime (too bad the purported "civilians" had AKs and RPGs).

More at the link.