An independent French journalist, Sylvain Mercadier, and a Syrian lawyer, Mohammad Fayad, were arrested this Wednesday by the Israeli army while reporting in the occupied Syrian Golan. According to his colleagues, many of whom reacted and called for his release on social networks, the journalist was violently apprehended by Israeli troops “while he was covering Israel’s advance into Syrian territory in Al- Hamidiyah, on the outskirts of Qouneitra.”
“They are neither members of Hamas, nor Hezbollah, nor HTS (Hay’at Tahrir el-Sham, the Islamist rebel group which led the offensive against Assad, editor’s note). Israel being a so-called ‘democratic’ country, they must be liberated quickly,” journalist Quentin Muller, head of the international service of the French media Marianne, with whom Sylvain Mercadier collaborates, wrote on X.
He specifies that the Marianne editorial team has “no news” of the journalist and his companion, while witnesses claim that they were “beaten, handcuffed and blindfolded before being taken who knows where”. His electronic equipment was also reportedly seized.
A few days earlier, Sylvain Mercadier had published in the columns of Marianne a report reporting that the Israeli army left the Golan Heights and had begun to invade Syrian villages by “occupying houses, brutalizing the population, even burning Korans and raising Israeli flags.”
On December 8, the day of the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the Israeli army announced that it had deployed in the demilitarized buffer zone of the Golan, in the southwest of Syria, on the edge of the part of this plateau occupied by Israel since 1967 and annexed in 1981.
An independent French journalist, Sylvain Mercadier, and a Syrian lawyer, Mohammad Fayad, were arrested this Wednesday by the Israeli army while reporting in the occupied Syrian Golan. According to his colleagues, many of whom reacted and called for his release on social networks, the journalist was violently apprehended by the troops…
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