Journalist Jihad As'ad Mohamed 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 Mohamed and three other journalists who were imprisoned — Akram Raslan, Austin Tice, and Fares Maamou — 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.
Mohamed was arrested by Syrian security forces in Damascus in August 2013. More than a decade after his arrest, the journalist’s wife still does not know if he is alive or where he is being held.
Prior to his arrest, the freelance writer contributed several articles criticizing the government’s crackdown on peaceful protests and calling for reforms to local news websites, including the pro-reform Alef Today.
Mohamed was last seen being taken away by security forces on Revolution Street in Damascus in August 2013, according to local and regional news outlets and a Facebook page calling for his release.
Mohamed was the editor-in-chief of the weekly Kassioun before leaving the newspaper in the summer of 2012 over an editorial disagreement, a staff member told 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 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.
Mohamed’s wife told CPJ in October that, despite her efforts to gather information about the whereabouts of her husband and rumors that Mohamed had either been killed in detention or seen at a Syrian military intelligence detention facility known as Section 215 and in Damascus’ Sednaya Prison, there was still no evidence of his fate.
Mohamed’s name does not appear on Syrian human rights organization Violations Documentation Center’s listof 8,000 detainees who were killed under torture in prisons run by the former Syrian government. 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 government.
In late 2024, CPJ emailed the Syrian mission to the United Nations and the Syrian Ministry of Defense for information on the status of the imprisoned Syrian journalists but received no response. Mohamed’s whereabouts still remained unclear in 2025.