Washington D.C. – The Washington Post, December 12, 2024
Biden administration officials say that, for now, it is too dangerous to deploy personnel to look for the missing American, who was abducted near Damascus 12 years ago.
The rebel group that now runs Syria’s government offered on Thursday to “cooperate directly” with the United States to search for missing American journalist Austin Tice, a move that analysts said could hasten efforts to learn his whereabouts, or whether he is living or dead.
The overture to Washington from the political wing of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, known by its initials HTS, was made publicly on the messaging app Telegram. Its statement indicated the group was already engaged, calling the search for Tice “ongoing.”
The development was welcomed by the Tice family, who have grown frustrated with the Biden administration and what they see as its inadequate action to this point. “We’re obviously pleased with anyone that’s making a concerted effort,” Marc Tice, Austin’s Tice’s father, told The Washington Post on Thursday. “I would be hopeful that the U.S. government would accept that offer.”
Thus far, the Biden administration has been communicating indirectly with the rebel group, through Turkey, officials say. It declined to comment on whether Thursday’s outreach from HTS would change that. The United States considers the organization, once affiliated with al-Qaeda, a terrorist group.
For now, the administration is refraining from deploying U.S. personnel to aid in the search in Syria for Tice, who was abducted 12 years ago outside Damascus while reporting on Syria’s civil war.
“There’s a high bar to sending U.S. personnel into potentially dangerous situations where they could face harm,” a senior administration official said in a statement to The Post earlier this week. “In this case, we unfortunately do not have any verifiable information about where Austin Tice is.
If Tice, a Marine veteran who was 31 at the time of his disappearance, is alive andstill in a facility in Syria, “HTS is probably the best positioned on the ground to confirm this,” said Bruce Hoffman, a senior fellow for counterterrorism at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Robert Ford, the last U.S. ambassador to Syria before the embassy was shuttered in 2012 and who pushed the government then to designate the group as a terrorist organization, said HTS “appears to have evolved.” He urged the Biden administration to at least engage with the group’s leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. “I don’t know if he’s credible,” said Ford, now a fellow at the Middle East Institute. “But you have to press to test.”
President Joe Biden and other administration officials have sought to project optimism that Tice will be located, saying the fall of Syria’s longtime dictator, Bashar al-Assad, presents an opportunity to collect and assess leads. “We are talking through the Turks and others, to people on the ground in Syria to say: ‘Help us with this. Help us get Austin Tice home,’” national security adviser Jake Sullivan said earlier this week on “Good Morning America.”
Yet privately, many officials in Washington have taken a more sober view, noting there is no confirmed evidence he is either alive or dead. The CIA’s “low confidence” assessment that Tice is living, officials said, is underpinned by the absence of intelligence showing otherwise.
“We’re hopeful,” one U.S. official said. “But there’s been no proof of life in a long time.”
Tice was abducted in August 2012. Weeks later, video emerged showing him blindfolded, being led through rugged terrain by armed men in white robes. That 47-second clip, in which Tice can be heard uttering “Oh, Jesus,” was the last direct indication he was living, officials say.
Tice wrote for The Post, McClatchy newspapers and other U.S.-based media outlets before his disappearance. A gritty and determined journalist, he was committed to telling the story of Syrian civilians caught up in the conflict, colleagues have said.
Last week, Tice’s parents and six siblings held a news conference in Washington after meetings at the White House and State Department, talks that Marc Tice characterized to reporters as “complaints and finger-pointing about who is preventing things from happening, and who’s responsible for doing what.”
“We’ve seen what real commitment looks like,” he said during the news conference, alluding to recent prisoner swaps with Russia, China and Hamas fighters in Gaza that have seen U.S. captives go free. “We’ve yet to see it for Austin Tice.”
Prisoner swaps are more challenging, U.S. officials say privately, when the government the United States believes to be holding an American citizen does not acknowledge doing so, as in the case of Tice.
American journalists, including from The Post, traveled this week to Damascus to report on the release of thousands of detainees from prisons where the Assad regime held and tortured dissidents and other political prisoners. A Washington Post team visited the notorious Sednaya prison, where executions were so commonplace that it became known to Syrians as the “slaughterhouse.”
The Tice family is working with the American group Hostage Aid Worldwide, which specializes in trying to find and win the release of individuals unlawfully detained overseas. Its president, Nizar Zakka, a dual Lebanese-American citizen, is in Damascus and coordinating with nongovernmental groups in Syria as well as Lebanese officials who might have leads about Tice.
It was Zakka and his group who on Thursday were among the first to encounter Travis Timmerman, an American who told reporters in Syria that he had been freed after spending seven months in the Sednaya prison. Zakka said he sent video of Timmerman to his contacts in the FBI to help verify his identity.
“It was crazy,” Zakka said in an interview, “because we were looking for Austin and we found another guy. I was so surprised.”
