Independent War Correspondent
Bilal AbdulKareem
He went where the cameras would not. Now he is the story.
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On 22 December 2025, security forces seized Bilal Abdul Kareem near the Al-Fath Mosque in Al-Bab, northern Aleppo. Two vehicles of armed men from the General Security Directorate surrounded him and drove him to an undisclosed location. Months on, his family still has no charge sheet, no court date, and little contact.
Charge him promptly or release him immediately. Anything else is unconscionable. Roshan Muhammed Salih, Editor, 5Pillars
He was born Darrell Lamont Phelps in 1970 in Mount Vernon, New York. He grew up playing baseball and going to church, and he could talk. As a boy he won first prize in a school contest reciting the Gettysburg Address. He went on to a performing arts college upstate, toured with a theatre company warning students about drugs, and worked the New York stand-up comedy circuit.
In 1994 his sister, Sheila Jackson, was shot and killed by her partner. Three years later, living near a mosque in Brooklyn and hearing the call to prayer each day, he embraced Islam. To read the Quran in its own language he studied in Khartoum, then moved to Egypt and learned Arabic from the ground up.
The people who know him say he never lost the comic. He is the one who cracks a joke in a basement during an airstrike, just to keep the children laughing.
He carried his humour into the warzone, lifting people up on the days that were hardest to bear.
He began in media as the first program director of Huda TV in Cairo, then left because he wanted to make hard news, not soft religious programming. He filmed in Rwanda and in post-Gaddafi Libya, where he made the documentary Torture Agreement. In 2012 he entered Syria and stayed. Because he was there and they were not, the biggest networks in the world ran his footage.
Broadcast and featured by
Al Jazeera audiences voted him Personality of the Week in 2016.
When he felt the mainstream story drifting from the people living it, he co-founded On the Ground News, funded only by public donations so no editor could soften the footage. He became one of the last reporters inside eastern Aleppo during the 2016 siege, filming barrel bombs and the families beneath them while distant studios narrated the war from comfort.
The people he covered gave him a quiet title: the conscience of Syria's opposition.
His rule was simple. Getting the truth out means listening to all sides. That access made his reporting a rare window for analysts, aid groups, and ordinary viewers trying to understand a war few could reach.
On the public record
The 5Pillars team have worked closely with him over the years and have publicly pressed for his release.
International press-freedom monitors have logged his detention and called for him to be charged or released.
The legal charity took his fight against the US kill list to court, arguing for the due process owed to any journalist.
Across 2016 and 2017 he survived at least five drone strikes and bombings in northern Syria. Convinced he had been placed on the United States kill list for interviewing commanders on camera, in 2017 he filed a lawsuit against the CIA and senior US officials, brought by the legal charity Reprieve.
In 2018 a federal judge ruled he had a real claim to due process. The government then invoked the state secrets privilege, refusing to confirm or deny his status on national security grounds, and the case was dismissed in 2019. Even so, it forced an open argument about whether a journalist can be marked for death with no day in court.
Far from the extremist his detractors painted, in 2022 he co-founded a human rights initiative and helped draft the Justice Covenant, known in Arabic as the Justice Charter: a set of rules drawn from UN conventions, meant to bind armed groups to the humane treatment of prisoners.
He asked every side, his own included, to live up to the same standard of justice.
Darrell Lamont Phelps grows up playing baseball and winning oratory contests in New York.
Studies performing arts, tours with a theatre company, and works as a New York stand-up comedian.
After his sister Sheila is killed, he embraces Islam, then studies in Khartoum and Egypt to learn Arabic.
After documentaries in Rwanda and Libya, he enters Syria and never really leaves.
Among the last reporters in eastern Aleppo, and voted Al Jazeera Personality of the Week by its audience.
Sues the US government over the drone kill list. A judge backs his due process claim before the case is dismissed.
Held for six months by HTS in Idlib after reporting on the torture of detainees, then released.
Co-founds a human rights initiative and drafts the Justice Covenant, pressing armed groups to treat prisoners humanely.
Detained in Al-Bab by security forces of the new administration. No charge. No trial. Still held.
The detention of Bilal Abdul Kareem is not merely the detention of an individual journalist. It represents a significant test of press freedom, due process, and transparency in post-Assad Syria.
For more than a decade, Bilal documented events that influenced regional and international politics. He reported from areas where few journalists could operate and provided a unique perspective on the Syrian conflict and its aftermath.
His detention raises broader questions regarding the treatment of journalists, freedom of expression, government accountability, and the future of independent reporting in Syria.
The manner in which this case is handled will be closely watched by journalists, human rights organizations, policymakers, governments, and press freedom advocates worldwide.
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Bilal Abdul Kareem has not been charged with any crime or given a trial. He spent his life carrying the truth out of places the world had turned away from. Now he needs the world to turn back toward him.
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