Efforts to locate Austin Tice, the American journalist who was kidnapped more than a dozen years ago while covering Syria’s civil war, have taken on new urgency following the sudden fall of Bashar Assad’s regime in the country.
U.S. officials have tracked down a number of prisons in Syria that could hold information they believe could lead them to Tice, according to The New York Times, as the rebels who toppled the Assad regime have begun destroying the country’s political prisons to empty.
President Joe Biden seemed cautiously optimistic this weekend that Tice will be brought home.
“We believe he is alive,” Biden said. “We think we can get him back, but we don’t have direct evidence of that yet.”
However, U.S. military officials noted that there are currently no plans for a hostage rescue mission, the Times said.
Matthew Miller, a State Department spokesman, said Tuesday that the U.S. government has “no higher priority than the safe return of Austin Tice to his family,” but added that he had no further details to share on the status of the search efforts.
John Kirby, the White House national security communications adviser, echoed Miller, saying that while this moment “could provide us with an opportunity to gather more information about [Tice]his whereabouts, his condition”, there are still many unknowns.
“I just want to tell you that our assumption is that he’s still alive; that we have no evidence, no information to the contrary,” Kirby said of Tice.
Roger Carstens, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, has traveled to Beirut to seek information on Tice’s location, the State Department said earlier this week. (Lebanon has long conversations about Tice’s fate.)
HuffPost has reached out to the State Department for comment on the status of the search efforts for Tice.
Meanwhile, Tice’s parents have said they have what they describe as credible information indicating their son is being “treated well.”
“We have from a major source, which has already been verified by the entire government, that Austin Tice is alive, that Austin Tice is being treated well, and there is no doubt about that,” his mother, Debra, said Friday at the National Press Club .
But Debra Tice also expressed frustration with the government’s handling of the case, telling CNN’s Erin Burnett, “There’s no urgency to find him and make sure he’s okay.”
The US has long maintained that the American journalist was being held in Syria, despite the Assad regime’s denials.
The collapse of that regime, after a surprise offensive that prompted the former Syrian president and his family to flee to Moscow, appears to have fueled hopes within the US that Tice can be found.
The head of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a U.S. nonprofit, was also expected to arrive in Damascus on Wednesday as part of an effort to locate the American journalist.
“There are a few locations where our government thinks he could be. I know these geolocations and I plan to visit them all,” Mouaz Moustafa told The Washington Post earlier this week.
Tice was captured on August 13, 2012 while reporting in Daraya, a suburb of the Syrian capital, a few days after he turned 31. Tice was last seen in a short video posted online a month after his arrest, where he appeared blindfolded. , and guided around by armed men, according to CBS.
Tice, a Navy veteran, worked as a freelance journalist and photographer for CBS and the Post, among others, before he was captured.
