Abdalaziz Alhamza is a human rights defender, award-winning journalist and IT trainer from Raqqa, Syria. In 2011 Abdalaziz started to first participate in and later organize protests and demonstrations against the Bashar Al-Assad regime. He was arrested by the regime several times.

​

In 2014 Abdalaziz and his friends founded RBSS (Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently) and he became its spokesperson. This non-partisan, independent citizen journalist group exposed the atrocities committed by the Assad regime, other groups occupying Northern Syria and by ISIS. While Raqqa was under the control of ISIS, every media outlet was shot down, no foreign journalists were allowed to enter the city, and the city was hermetically sealed. Abdalaziz and his friends were not professional journalists at the beginning, only people who wanted the world to know about the cruelty of ISIS. Thus, they used their old Nokia phones and filmed, whenever possible, snippets and moments of daily life in Raqqa under ISIS: executions, beheadings, and sexual violence. Then they uploaded the material to the internet. The images and video footage of RBBS were one of the few reliable sources and were shown worldwide on every important television network and media outlet including BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, MSNBC and the New York Times.

​

Several members of RBSS have been assassinated by ISIS since 2014. After ISIS had put a ransom on Abdalazi's life and the lives of his friends he was forced to flee to Turkey and is currently living in exile in Germany. Abdalaziz Alhamza received among others the International Press Freedom award, and the Civil Courage Prize and has become a fellow of the McCain Institute. The story of Abdalaziz and his friends was featured in the compelling documentary "City of Ghosts".