Syrian freelance journalist Jihad As’ad Mohamed was arrested by Syrian security forces in Damascus in August 2013. Eleven years after his arrest, the journalist’s wife has been unable to confirm if he is still alive or where he is being held.
Prior to his arrest, the freelance writer contributed several critical articles to local news websites, including the pro-reform Alef Today. In his articles, he criticized the government’s crackdown on peaceful protests and called for reforms.
Mohamed was last seen being taken away by security forces on Revolution Street in Damascus in August 2013, according to local and regional news reports and a Facebook page calling for his release.
Mohamed was the editor-in-chief of the weekly Kassioun before leaving the paper in the summer of 2012, citing a disagreement with the paper’s editorial position, according to a staff member at Kassioun who spoke to CPJ. The paper is affiliated with the socialist Popular Will party which, unlike other opposition groups, showed a willingness to engage with the Syrian government at the time.
Syrian state security forces had previously summoned Mohamed for questioning several times prior to the outbreak of the Syrian uprising in 2011 and once more after he gave an interview to the Arabic edition of the Russian channel Russia Today in May 2011 supporting protests, according to news reports and Amnesty International. The journalist joined Kassioun in 2006, the reports said.
Mohamed’s wife told CPJ that, despite her efforts to gather information about the whereabouts of her husband and rumors that Mohamed had been either killed in detention or seen at a Syrian military intelligence detention facility known as Section 215 and in Damascus’ Sednaya Prison, as of 2024 there is no evidence of his whereabouts.
Mohamed’s name does not appear on Syrian human rights organization Violations Documentation Center’s list of 8,000 detainees who were killed under torture in prisons run by the former Syrian government.
In late 2024, CPJ emailed the then-Syrian mission to the United Nations and the then-Syrian ministry of defense for information on the status of imprisoned Syrian journalists but received no response. The government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fell on December 8 after opposition groups launched a surprise offensive and the whereabouts of Mohamed remained unclear in early 2025.
A 2021 report by the London-based Syrian Network for Human Rights found that over 100,000 people have been forcibly disappeared in Syria since 2011, the vast majority by the Syrian regime.