Journalist Fares Maamou appeared in CPJ's 2024 prison census and has been reclassified as missing as of December 8, 2024, to account for a mass exodus from the country’s jails following the ouster of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. The fates of Maamou and three other journalists who were imprisoned — Akram Raslan, Austin Tice, and Jihad As’ad Mohamed — remain unknown. CPJ has classified these four journalists as missing to ensure their cases remain in the public eye and press authorities to account for their status and whereabouts.
Since Maamou’s arrest by Syrian security forces in 2012, no news has emerged about the journalist. Maamou was a contributor to the Damascus-based Shaam News Network and posted tens of thousands of videos documenting the unrest in Syria since the start of the uprising in March 2011. The network’s footage was used by international news organizations, including Al-Jazeera and the BBC.
Maamou was arrested in Homs, where he had been covering events in the neighborhoods of Deir Baalba and al-Rabee al-Arabi for the network, according to accounts from local activists and press freedom groups.
Maamou’s name does not appear on the Violations Documentation Center’s list of 8,000 detainees who were killed under torture in prisons run by the Syrian government. A 2021 report by the London-based Syrian Network for Human Rights found that over 100,000 people had been forcibly disappeared in Syria since 2011, the vast majority by the Syrian government.
In late 2024, CPJ emailed the Syrian mission to the United Nations and the Ministry of Defense for information on the status of the imprisoned Syrian journalists, but received no response from the former administration. Mamou’s whereabouts still remained unclear in 2025.