BEIRUT, Lebanon — Even as the Syrian war took bigger and bigger bites out of his life, Fidaa al-Baali never stopped trying to document the conflict — not when his brother, a rebel fighter, died in battle; not when security officials, trying to pressure him, arrested his father; not even when the rebel battalion he was embedded with unleashed a mortar attack that killed his fiancée.

On Friday, Mr. Baali, a citizen journalist and an antigovernment activist known to many Syrians by the nom de guerre Mohammed Moaz, died of shrapnel wounds sustained weeks earlier as government forces shelled his neighborhood, Qaboun, on the outskirts of the Syrian capital, Damascus. Mr. Baali had remained in the working-class jumble of concrete houses during months of heavy bombardment, rushing with his video camera to the scene of attacks.

When antigovernment demonstrations broke out in March 2011 and citizen journalists began documenting them on video, Mr. Baali, who was in his early 20s, was among the first who dared to show his face — a distinctive one, with deep-set eyes and a shock of dark hair flopping across his forehead. He looked straight into the camera, helping to embolden an army of young Syrians who, as protest turned to armed struggle, brought the war into the world’s living rooms from front lines that international journalists could not always reach.

For distant observers, the struggles and losses of Mr. Baali’s own life regularly played out on camera, and in the many interviews he gave by phone and Skype. They punctuated the drumbeat of generic violence, injecting intimacy into the swelling numbers of casualties that the world had grown accustomed to. He did not arm himself, but lived in hiding like a fighter, moving from one friend’s basement to another. Reporters who kept in touch with him on Skype often saw him in a windowless room, the thunder of shelling heard in the background.