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A veteran Japanese war correspondent was shot and killed while covering Syria's civil war, her family and the government said Tuesday.

Mika Yamamoto worked for The Japan Press, an independent TV news provider that specializes in conflict zone coverage.

She was hit by gunfire Monday while she and a colleague were travelling with the Free Syrian Army in the northwestern city of Aleppo, said Masaru Sato, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo. The rebel army is trying to topple the regime of President Bashar Assad.

A YouTube video posted by an activist in Syria shows Yamamoto, 45, inside a van wrapped in blankets with only her face visible. An Associated Press reporter who had worked with Yamamoto and who viewed the video confirmed her identity.

In another video, apparently taken at a field hospital, her Japanese colleague Kazutaka Sato wept as he looked into her blood-smeared face, then gently pressed his cheek against hers.

"Why? You are wearing a flak jacket," he said, speaking to her lifeless body. "That must hurt. Did you suffer? Were you shot in the head?" he asked, sobbing. Then he saw her arm with gunshot wounds, apparently suffered as she covered her head. "Oh, that hurt, didn't it?"

Yamamoto was shot in the neck, her father Koji Yamamoto cited Japanese government officials as saying.

She had covered the war in Afghanistan after 2001 and the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq from Baghdad as a special correspondent for NTV, according to Japan Press' website.

She was the fifth foreign journalist to be killed in Syria since the start of the war, the media watchdog group Reporters Without Borders said. A sixth journalist died from a severe asthma attack during an undercover reporting trip.