In an organized search for Austin Tice, an American journalist from Houston who was kidnapped in Damascus in 2012 while covering the country’s civil war, American activists, Western journalists, and Syria’s new militant leaders are searching the country’s deserted prisons, going through government files that have been abandoned, and attempting to locate former regime leaders.
The United States is being urged by activists to send in American forces to assist in the difficult hunt for Tice, which has so far produced no conclusive evidence that he is alive or dead.
According to Nizar Zakka, president of Hostage Aid Worldwide, a nonprofit organization located in Washington that is spearheading search operations in Syria on behalf of Tice’s family, they had to be here from the beginning. Every piece of evidence is being dispersed and destroyed.
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The Biden administration has been hesitant to send in specialized teams to assist in the search for Tice and a few other Americans who have vanished in Syria over the past 20 years, despite the fact that the United States has several hundred soldiers there with the specific goal of containing any resurgence of Islamic State violence.
On August 13, 2012, two days after turning 31, Marine Corps veteran Tice was kidnapped while working as a freelance journalist for McClatchy Newspapers and The Washington Post in Syria. A few weeks later, a video surfaced that showed an agonized Tice being dragged through some mountains by armed captors while chained and wearing a blindfold. Signs of Tice thereafter virtually vanished.
Although American officials have long been stymied in their attempts to even persuade the now-deposed Syrian government to acknowledge that they had the American, they still think that Tice was detained by the Assad administration. Although other U.S. government officials have stated they lack concrete proof, President Joe Biden stated earlier this month that the U.S. is acting under the presumption that Tice is still alive.
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Earlier this week, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller stated that although the White House is thinking about sending Americans to Damascus, they have not yet done so.
Debra Tice, Tice’s mother, told MSNBC on Tuesday that she has repeatedly encountered obstacles in her attempts to get the US to take more action to locate her son.
According to her, you won’t get a decent job if you force someone to do something they truly don’t want to do. For the people that dove right in and got right in there, those are the people we want to have working for us.
The search instead has been led by a hodge-podge of activists and journalists who have been looking for any traces of Tice in the Syrian regime s byzantine network of detention centers.
Hopeful family
The Tice family s hopes of finding the journalist were buoyed last week when rebel fighters seized control of Damascus and forced President Bashar al-Assad to flee the country, ending more than 50 years of Assad family rule.
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Activists and Western journalists armed with tips about where Tice might have been held have been searching the once-feared prisons that have been freed of all detainees. Tice was not among those freed in the early days.
False reports circulated late last week on social media that Tice had been found alive turned out to be a case of mistaken identity. Instead, people searching for Tice found a Missouri man, Travis Timmerman, who had been reported missing in June in Hungary.
Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a Washington-based nonprofit that long has opposed the Assad regime, was among the first Westerners to meet Timmerman and see that it wasn t Tice.
Moustafa, whose uncle is among the estimated 150,000 missing Syrians, has been searching for Tice, his uncle and a handful of other Americans believed held by Assad, including Majd Kamalmaz, a Syrian-American psychotherapist who was taken in 2017 at a Damascus government checkpoint. Earlier this year, U.S. officials told the Kamalmaz family they had solid information the therapist was dead.
In one former military center, Moustafa said he found cramped cells, pools of acid filled with human bones, and shredded government documents.
The U.S. government should send a team and put these papers together, he said.
Moustafa and Zakka both said they have found nothing to lead them to Tice.
We have no signs of Austin in any place so far, Zakka said.
Zakka expressed some concerns that Israeli airstrikes targeting Syrian military buildings could have hit prisons where Tice was held. Debra Tice wrote a personal appeal to Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, asking him not to target sites where her son might be held.
On Tuesday, Netanyahu responded with a letter assuring her Israel was coordinating with the United States on its targeting.
The (Israeli military) is not active in the area where Austin may be located, Netanyahu wrote.
Shifting search
Much of the search has turned to poring over millions of pages of abandoned government files and trying to track down Assad regime officials who know what happened to Tice.
In 2020, then-President Donald Trump sent two top aides to Damascus on a secret mission to try to free Tice. At the time, Roger Carstens, the State Department s top hostage negotiator, and Kash Patel, who is now President-elect Trump s choice to head the Federal Bureau of Investigation, met with Ali Mamlouk, Assad s longtime intelligence chief.
Mamlouk was unwilling to provide the American officials with proof Tice was still alive without major U.S. concessions and discussions ended without any progress, according to people briefed on the secret talks.
The FBI is offering a $1 million reward for information leading to Tice s safe return, an offer that has generated a variety of false and misleading tips.
In 2023, while working for the Wall Street Journal, this reporter was provided a photograph by an American source purporting to show Tice alive and well in Syria.
The photograph showed a young, smiling, bearded man sitting on a couch sporting tattoos similar to the tribal band and barbed wire band on Tice s arms. U.S. officials reviewed the photograph and quickly determined that it was not Tice. It appeared that someone had gone to great lengths in an effort to dupe U.S. officials and get some of the reward money.
Last week, a Syrian journalist detained by the Assad regime told Western reporters that he had been in a cell across from Tice as recently as 2022. Some investigators working to find Tice are wary of the former detainee s story, however, worried he may have mistaken someone else for Tice.
Debra Tice told MSNBC on Tuesday that she and her family saw something in a television report on the prison that made her think that her son had been held there.
We do think that Austin may have been in that specific cell, she said. There was something there that really seemed to us like Austin.
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Search for Houston journalist Austin Tice in Syria ongoing amid appeal for more U.S. help
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