In Memoriam: Mahmoud Muhammad al-Baridi

A friend who disappeared in Assad's prisons

It has been nearly four months since the fall of the Assad regime, but for many thousands of people inside and outside Syria, questions still remain about the fate of relatives and friends who disappeared inside the regime’s prison systems. When the regime fell and the prisons were opened up, many reports and rumours circulated about various individuals having purportedly been found alive. Sadly, a friend of mine who I had initially heard was found alive in the notorious Saydnaya prison is still missing, and I have by now more or less lost hope that he has survived. This is his story to commemorate him.

Mahmoud al-Baridi


Mahmoud Muhammad al-Baridi was born in July 1996. He was from the village of Jamlah in the Yarmouk Basin region of Deraa province in southwest Syria, near the borders with the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights and Jordan. Presently, the region has come into focus because of the Israeli incursion into southwest Syria since the fall of the Assad regime. The Baridi clan is among the notable families of the locality of Jamlah. With the onset of the protests and unrest against the Assad regime, members of the Baridi clan became part of the founding nucleus of the insurgent group Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk (‘Yarmouk Martyrs Brigade’), which in the period 2014-2015 became connected to the Islamic State and then formed the basis of the Islamic State affiliate Jaysh Khalid bin al-Walid. Mahmoud joined the Yarmouk Martyrs Brigade and worked with the group during its fight against Jabhat al-Nusra and various other insurgent factions (including those in the south under the ‘Free Army’ moniker), serving for a time as an amni khariji (‘external covert operative’- i.e. responsible for attacks on the group’s rivals behind their own lines), and for a time, he was supportive of the Islamic State, referring to Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk’s rivals as the ‘Sahwa forces of apostasy’.

I became acquainted with Mahmoud via ‘mutual friends’ on Facebook in 2016 as I was closely following events in the Yarmouk Basin at the time. By the time I began speaking to Mahmoud in late 2016, he had already left Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk/Jaysh Khalid, characterising the battles between Jaysh Khalid and the ‘Sahwa forces’ as little more than a farce. As such he had returned to civilian life and wanted to find a way to get to Turkey. In December 2016, he was briefly detained by Jaysh Khalid’s security apparatus on suspicion of collaboration with Jaysh Khalid’s insurgent rivals. During this detention, the group subjected him to torture, prompting him to flee detention but then be given a security guarantee by the group’s leader. As he put it: “The strike by which they hit me could not be borne by rocks. If I hadn’t fled, they would have killed me.” He described the group as having become a “criminal state,” and it was clear he had become disillusioned with the group and its ideology.

Mahmoud and I would talk frequently over the next 20 months or so, though our communication would occasionally be punctuated by absences in which he went offline. Mahmoud was not only a helpful source of information about Jaysh Khalid and the Yarmouk Basin (for example, it was through Mahmoud that I first learned about Afro-Syrians who live in the area), but also someone I came to see as a close friend. Admittedly, we had not met in person, but as he put it: “Although I don’t know you in person, the affection is from the Lord of the world-dwellers. I like you.” Mahmoud continued to express his desire to get out of Syria, though in the autumn of 2017, Jaysh Khalid offered for him to enlist in the group’s ranks. However, as both his father and I advised, he refused to take up the offer, even as that meant turning down a salary and source of provision. In April 2018, he had a brief run-in with Jaysh Khalid’s Hisba apparatus for smoking in public, requiring him to attend a ‘Shari‘i course’ (see document below).

In May 2018, however, Mahmoud suddenly disappeared from communication with me. While he had gone offline before, by the end of Ramadan and onset of Eid al-Fitr I began wondering what had happened to him and reached out to a cousin of his in the Yarmouk Basin. He informed me that Mahmoud had been arrested by Jaysh Khalid because they had found out he had been communicating with me. It turned out that the group had been monitoring my social media in a bid to find out who in the Yarmouk Basin was in contact with me. Those who remember interacting with me at the time will probably recall how awful and worried I was. I dreaded the idea that I might be the one responsible for his impending execution, and that I might see him in a video or photo series being executed for ‘collaboration’ and ‘apostasy.’

Fortunately though, he was released only a few days later, though the group confiscated his phone and told him he was barred from talking to me again. However, after he was released, we quickly resumed contact via an alternative Facebook account. To his amusement, he noted that the Jaysh Khalid interrogators claimed I was Israeli. They had looked through some of Mahmoud’s conversations with me and asked why I had been asking about figures like Abu Ali Saraya (who served as a judge in Jaysh Khalid). However, they could not prove that he knew I was supposedly ‘Israeli’ or anything else against him, and thus they released him. By this point, the Assad regime had begun its military campaign to reclaim control of southern Syria, though as he noted, many people had begun to get tired of the war and lose hope that the revolution might succeed, and thus were at least willing to give the prospect of the return of the regime a chance in the hope of reclaiming a sense of normality.

Although he would sometimes talk about the idea of fighting the regime to prevent it from reclaiming control of the Yarmouk Basin, he did not join Jaysh Khalid or bear arms during this stage. Instead, he settled on either trying to exit the area and heading towards Turkey or doing taswiyat al-wad’ (‘regularisation of status’). However, by late July or early August 2018, he had become wanted by the regime on the allegation of being a member of Jaysh Khalid/Islamic State. He attributed his problems to accusations from members of the Samuri family, one of the other main families in Jamlah. Many members of the Samuri family disliked members of the Baridi family and saw them as responsible for the rise of the Islamic State/Jaysh Khalid in the Yarmouk Basin.

Mahmoud in the Yarmouk Basin, July 2018. This is part of the last set of photos I have of him prior to his disappearance.

Unable to get out of the area towards the north, he eventually decided to try to settle his status with the Syrian army’s Fourth Division, which was one of the main options for people in the south seeking taswiya, the other being the Russian-backed V Corps): the broad idea was that locals in Deraa and Qunaytra could do taswiya with these formations and serve as local holding forces affiliated with them, instead of performing military service outside the south. But instead of providing him some kind of amnesty, the Fourth Division arrested him, and after 21 August 2018, just shy of my 26th birthday, I no longer heard from him. According to his younger brother, Mahmoud was arrested in the al-Sabura area of Damascus countryside, where the Fourth Division was based. His younger brother, who had never been involved with Liwa Shuhada’ al-Yarmouk or Jaysh Khalid, tried to adapt to the reality of the return of the regime by enlisting in the Syrian army, but deserted after 18 months and fled to Turkey and is now in Europe.

After first learning of Mahmoud’s arrest in late 2018, I knew that I had to be cautious. Although he had been arrested on the false accusation of being a member of Islamic State, I realised that those who had arrested him might have access to his phone and social media and know of his connection to me. How might they view me? Might they also use a connection to me as something to hold against him? Together with the reality of the regime’s growing control over the country and the fact that it was becoming increasingly important to know what was going on inside regime-held areas, I felt as though I had to impose self-censorship on myself: being careful in use of terminology and avoiding the perception that I might be a pro-opposition activist gathering intelligence on the regime and its forces.

Even so, I never forgot Mahmoud and would often wonder about him, and try to ask about him among some local contacts. I told few friends or acquaintances about his arrest by the regime, and would conceal my internal sadness from the world around me. I would sometimes see Mahmoud in my dreams, imagining that he had returned to contact with me after getting out of prison, only to wake up and realise he was not there. On one occasion in 2021, I was told by someone in Jamlah that Mahmoud had got out of prison and headed towards Turkey, but this news turned out to be false. His brother subsequently got in contact with me, noting how the family had heard various things about his fate and whereabouts: he was still alive, he had been sentenced to death by a ‘military field court’ but the sentence had been suspended, he had died under torture, he was in Saydnaya prison. This sort of contradictory information was by no means unique to Mahmoud’s case: in fact, it was typical of the sort of lying and messing around that relatives of detainees would face when trying to inquire about their loved ones in the regime’s prison system. Mahmoud’s father, a pharmacist who was not affiliated with any faction but had preferred for the regime’s return to the rule of Jaysh Khalid, had tried to entrust a lawyer with following up on his case, but to no avail. A further tragedy struck the family in December 2022 when Mahmoud’s father was assassinated in Jamlah. To date of course, as with so many assassinations that took place in Deraa province after the regime returned in 2018, his killers have not been identified and there has been no accountability.

With the report that Mahmoud was in Saydnaya prison being the only concrete information to act upon, his brother and I were naturally keen to know whether he might be found alive in the prison as the regime collapsed and Saydnaya’s gates were opened. I will not forget the night of 8 December 2024 when the regime finally collapsed and Saydnaya prison was opened. A friend of Mahmoud’s brother had gone to Saydnaya prison to inquire about Mahmoud and had been informed that Mahmoud had got out and was in a hospital in Damascus.

Given that I was so keen to hear something on his fate, I assumed this news was true and posted about it. However, subsequent inquiries by the friend of Mahmoud’s brother failed to turn up any information on his possible whereabouts in a hospital in Damascus. Even so, I wanted to wait and see if we should hear anything about him. After all, another individual I knew from al-Rafid in al-Qunaytra who disappeared in the regime’s prison system in the same year as Mahmoud did on ‘terrorism’ charges subsequently did get out alive and is now back home. That contact from al-Rafid had not immediately contacted me after his release, and his own case briefly raised my hope again that perhaps Mahmoud was out there but was waiting to sort out his affairs and get Internet access before reaching out. However, my hopes were dashed again when this contact from al-Rafid made inquiries to see if there was any information on Mahmoud: no information could be found as to his fate and whereabouts.

At this point, like Mahmoud’s brother, I am almost certain that Mahmoud is no longer alive, but I feel that a definitive answer to his fate can only come through examination of documents recovered from the regime’s prisons. Sadly, it could be some time before those records are organised and made available to researchers and the public, but such an undertaking is vital if there is ever going to be true accountability in Syria. It may be argued that accountability is a matter of focusing on the past and that it is time to move on for the sake of building a new Syria, but justice needs to be done to the historical record, and true reconciliation cannot be a matter of glossing over what has happened. As journalist Loubna Mrie emphasises, “Without a meaningful way to address the pain and losses of a nation still desperately seeking answers, Syria faces a grave risk of spiralling back into the violence and chaos it desperately needs to escape.”

Despite the near certain loss of Mahmoud, I consider myself relatively lucky compared to many others. I did not lose my parents, siblings or other members of my family in prisons. Moreover, two people I know did make it out of Assad’s prisons alive. I have not had to go through the experience of activist Wafa Mustafa, whose father was abducted by the regime in 2013 and has not been heard from since. Very admirably, Wafa has never let up in campaigning to learn of the fate of detainees, while being consistent in her stance against all human rights abuses committed in Syria, regardless of the perpetrator.

I cannot say the same of those who now talk frequently about abuses and crimes against minorities in Syria and suddenly seem to have turned into activists for human rights in Syria but have had little or nothing to say about those like Mahmoud who have disappeared in the prisons and seemingly treat the missing as a mere relic of the past from which we should move on. I am angry too at those who glossed over the Assad regime’s crimes and abuses while Bashar al-Assad was still in power, at best giving a token acknowledgement of the awful nature of the regime before turning the bulk of their focus as to why people needed to stand by the regime as a supposed crucial pillar of ‘resistance’ to ‘US empire’ and/or Israel, and now acting as though they have nothing to apologise for and reflect on. I am also angry at some of these same people who thought or think it is somehow sophisticated and challenging ‘mainstream media’ to deny some of the regime’s atrocities, like the existence of mass graves and the use of chemical weapons.

We cannot bring back Mahmoud and others who were executed or tortured to death in the prisons, but we should not let them become mere names on lists and statistics. Behind each name is an individual story that needs to be told.