Following the overthrow of longtime Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in a surprise offensive, the United States has stepped up its attempts to find missing journalist Austin Tice in Syria. White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan stated Monday that finding Tice is a “top priority,” just one day after opposition fighters led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group took over Damascus. Meanwhile, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller stated that an envoy had been dispatched to Beirut as part of “intensive efforts” to locate Tice.
According to Sullivan, Washington is attempting to “locate the prison where [Tice] may be held, get him out, get him home safely to his family” now that al-Assad has left the country and his regime has fallen. Since being kidnapped in Damascus in 2012 while covering the popular uprising against al-Assad, Tice has been missing. As the brutal conflict continued, there has been no progress in finding the former US marine, who was working as a freelance writer when he vanished. With US captive affairs ambassador Roger Carstens visiting Lebanon to learn more about Tice’s whereabouts, the US is now intensifying its efforts. “Help us with this,” US officials were requesting from Turkiye and those on the ground in Syria. Sullivan stated, “Help us get Austin Tice home.”
In addition to being one of the main foreign backers of Syrian rebel organizations, Turkiye is at odds with the Syrian Democratic Forces, a US-backed pro-Kurdish organization that Ankara views as a “terrorist” organization. Although the US views HTS as a “terrorist” organization, the US State Department said on Monday that Washington had recently engaged with groups in Syria, including through middlemen. The most recent effort to locate Tice coincides with the liberation of thousands of captives who had been detained for years by al-Assad’s regime by rebel factions during their rapid attack throughout Syria. In the midst of what rights monitors have characterized as the former Syrian leader’s ruthless crackdown on any perceived form of dissent, many of their fates had remained unknown to their families.
Since the start of the Syrian crisis in 2011, al-Assad has jailed or forcibly vanished over 155,000 people, according to a 2023 study by the Syrian Network for Human Rights. Other parties inside the shattered nation, such as ISIL (ISIS), which at its height ruled over substantial portions of Syria and Iraq, are alleged to have detained or disappeared the others.
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