Washington D.C. – The Washington Post, December 10, 2024
With Assad gone, the United States has a new opportunity to bring Austin Tice home safely.
It wasn’t the teetering regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria that inspired Austin Tice’s parents to come to Washington. Instead, they had recently received new information about their son’s condition and whereabouts from contacts within the U.S. government. And they came to town to make a case to high-ranking Biden administration officials to do more to secure his freedom.
On Friday, Marc and Debra Tice, accompanied by Austin’s six siblings, met with national security adviser Jake Sullivan at the White House and Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the State Department, asking the administration to follow through on promises made by President Joe Biden. They left those meetings frustrated by the lack of initiative.
Austin Tice, a freelance journalist and Marine Corps veteran who was covering the Syrian civil war for American news organizations including CBS News, McClatchy and The Post, was abducted in 2012. At this point, he is by far the longest-detained American hostage. Although the last publicly available images of Tice were taken soon after his capture, there has been a regular stream of information about him since that fateful day. Debra Tice’s dogged determination has sent her to Syria multiple times to seek her son’s freedom.
By Sunday, with the fall of Assad, the Tices’ trip to Washington took on a new significance. “We believe he’s alive,” Biden said at a news conference. “We think we can get him back, but we have no direct evidence to that yet, and Assad should be held accountable.”
