Alkarama fears that such secret detention is conducive to abuses and torture by the security forces and has therefore informed the Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances about these cases. Alkarama requested that the Working Group urgently intervene with the Syrian Authorities on behalf of Pir Rostom and Mohamed Daher to ensure that their families are informed of their fate and whereabouts.

These two disappearances come in the context of a number of other arrests and disappearances of members of opposition movements - such as Mr Yusuf al Dheeb, disappeared on 15 November 2009 - and human rights activists - such as Mr Haitham Maleh, disappeared on 14 October 2009 only to reappear before a military court later that month.

Ahmed Mustafa Ben-Mohammed, better known as Pir Rostom, 47, is a writer, political activist and human rights defender. He has written fourteen novels in Arabic and Kurdish; he is a member of the Central Committee of the Democratic Kurdish Party and member of the National Council of the Damascus Declaration.

Pir Rostom has spent nearly 2 years living in Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan, often traveling back and forth from Iraq to Syria and Lebanon. He returned home to Aleppo on 26 October 2009 and on 5 November 2009, he was disappeared by agents of the Political Security forces in plain clothes who did not show him any judicial arrest warrant. He has therefore been detained, without any contact with his family or his lawyer, for nearly 3 months as at the date of this comunication.

He had been arrested twice before, in December 2007 following a public meeting of the National Council of the Damascus Declaration and in March 2008 in Afrin, his home town.

On Wednesday 2 December 2009, around 11am Mohamed Daher and his colleague were traveling from Lebanon to Syria. They got to the border crossing at Jdeidet Yabous, where the officer of the Syrian General Security asked to stamp their passports. Following an identity check, Mr Daher was taken by the General Security services and there has been no news of him since.

Alkarama calls on the Syrian government to immediately release these two individuals, as well as the numerous others disappeared recently, and to cease harassing and disappearing political opponents and human rights defenders.