UK – The Independent, January 03, 2025
Bel Trew joins those searching Damascus and other sites across the country for journalist Austin Tice and other American citizens who went missing under the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad
Makeshift blindfolds, rusted manacles, and messages of despair scratched into the walls of solitary confinement cells by inmates using olive stones.
These are the signs of “life” left in the haunted corridors of the prison in the Republican Guard Compound in Damascus: a notorious and previously closed-off location in the Syrian capital.
Clinging to a hill overlooking the city, the sprawling complex and prison is, according to US diplomats and intelligence officials, one of the most likely locations where the regime of Bashar al-Assad detained Austin Tice, the longest-held American journalist in history.
The former US Marine was abducted in government-controlled areas while reporting on Syria‘s civil war in 2012 and is among a “handful” of Americans who remain missing, including American psychotherapist Majd Kamalmaz, who vanished in 2017.
The US believes Tice was still alive right up until the overthrow of Assad, whose administration spent decades forcibly disappearing, torturing and murdering people. In many cases, the evidence was destroyed – with US officials saying that included the use of dissolving vats of acid and cremating remains.
And so, it is vital that every site that Tice and others may be or have been is searched thoroughly and quickly.
An FBI forensic team has visited the guard compound to scout for clues, including documenting English phrases scratched into the walls, says Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Roger Carstens, who personally joined the search in a recent trip to Damascus that he called “thorough but not exhaustive.”
“More work needs to be done on that specific site [the Republican Guard Compound] alone. There are many more sites in different physical locations that must be investigated,” he says back at his office in Washington DC, holding a map of at least 11 locations that require a proper search.
This is difficult in the immediate chaotic aftermath of the fall of Assad, when thousands of people descended on these areas looking for any information about their loved ones—among them, possibly regime figures who were also looking to remove their files.
The US are being assisted by Hayat Tahrir al -Sham (HTS), the Islamist rebel group that led the stunning overthrow of Assad.
“One of my greatest concerns is that every day, evidence disappears, is damaged, or is lost. And so, it will be unable to be used to either find Austin or prosecute those who may have had a hand in his detention,” Carstens adds.
“Even in my short time at one detention facility, I saw what I would characterise as hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper and other types of documentation that it would have been helpful to sort through.”
He adds that computer hard drives and CCTV footage looked to be missing.
