Washington D.C. – Houston Landing, December 18, 2024
American activists, Western journalists and Syria’s new militant leaders are scouring the nation’s abandoned prisons, poring through abandoned government files and trying to track down former regime leaders in a coordinated hunt to find Austin Tice, a Houston native and American journalist who was abducted in Damascus in 2012 while reporting on the country’s civil war.
Activists trying to find Tice are calling on the United State to send in American forces to help with the complicated search, which so far has yielded no clear signs that he is alive or dead.
“They needed to be here from Day One,” said Nizar Zakka, president of Hostage Aid Worldwide, the Washington-based nonprofit leading search efforts in Syria on behalf of Tice’s family. “All the evidence is being destroyed and scattered.”
While the United States has several hundred soldiers in Syria focused on a limited mission to contain any resurgence of Islamic State violence, the Biden administration has been reluctant to send in specialized teams to help search for Tice and a handful of other Americans who disappeared in the country over the last two decades.
Tice, a Marine Corps veteran, was working in Syria as a freelance journalist for McClatchy Newspapers and The Washington Post when he was abducted on Aug. 13, 2012, two days after his 31st birthday. A few weeks later, a video appeared showing an anguished Tice, bound and blindfolded, being led through some mountains by armed captors. After that, signs of Tice all-but evaporated.
American officials believe Tice was held by the Assad regime, but they long have been frustrated in their efforts to even get the now-deposed Syrian government to admit that they held the American. President Joe Biden said earlier this month that the U.S. is acting on the assumption that Tice is alive, though other U.S. government officials have said they have no firm evidence that is true.
Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesman earlier this week said the White House is considering sending Americans into Damascus, but has yet to do so.
Tice’s mother, Debra, told MSNBC on Tuesday that her efforts to get the United States to do more to find her son consistently have hit brick walls.
“If you are pushing someone to do something they really don’t want to do, you’re not going to get a good job anyway,” she said. “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.
