Bassam Al-Ahmed is a Syrian human rights defender and blogger from Qamishli in the Al-Hasakah governorate who began his activism in 2005 by joining clandestine Kurdish democratic rights organisations and later took part in sessions and events in Damascus on citizenship culture, civil society, human rights, the Constitution and minority issues. He was first detained on 16 February 2012 when the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression, where he had started working the previous month, was raided by Air Force Intelligence, which arrested the entire team including journalist Mazen Darwich. He was held incommunicado for 87 days before being released, after which he joined the Violations Documentation Center led by human rights lawyer Razan Zaitouneh. The VDC documented tens of thousands of killings, cases of ill-treatment and enforced disappearances, published the first documented report on the August 2013 chemical massacre in the Ghouta of Damascus, and reported on atrocities at Military Security Branch 215 and the existence of mass graves.