WASHINGTON — The household of Austin Tice, a journalist who disappeared greater than a decade in the past in Syria, voiced cautious optimism Friday that the sweeping insurgent offensive will present new leverage with the regime to safe his launch.
“Austin Tice is alive. Austin Tice is handled properly, and there’s no doubt about that,” mentioned his mom, Debra Tice, attributing this data to a “vital supply” she mentioned was vetted by the US authorities. Tice’s dad and mom and siblings spoke on the Nationwide Press Membership following a gathering with US nationwide safety advisor Jake Sullivan.
The assembly got here as fighters, led by Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), superior on Syria’s third-largest metropolis of Homs as a part of a surprising offensive that poses probably the most critical problem to Assad’s autocratic rule in years.
Tice traveled to Syria the summer time earlier than his last 12 months at Georgetown Regulation to cowl the nation’s civil warfare as a contract journalist for shops that included McClatchy, CBS and the Washington Submit. Tice disappeared on Aug. 14, 2012, three days after his thirty first birthday, after his taxi was stopped at a checkpoint in a Damascus suburb.
Little is publicly recognized about his whereabouts or well-being, apart from a 47-second clip that surfaced 5 weeks after his disappearance, which analysts consider might need been staged.
Tice is amongst a number of Individuals, most of them twin residents, thought to have been imprisoned by the Syrian regime throughout the civil warfare. They embrace Majd Kamalmaz, a psychotherapist from Virginia, who’s presumed to have died in regime captivity.
An absence of formal diplomatic relations with Syria has sophisticated US authorities efforts to carry Tice dwelling. The Trump administration did try making contact with the regime via varied again channels, and in late 2020, White Home official Kash Patel and Roger Carstens, the US particular envoy for hostage affairs, traveled to Damascus for uncommon negotiations on the detained Individuals.
The pair met with Syria’s sanctioned-intelligence chief, Ali Mamlouk, whose calls for the Related Press reported included a full US troop pullout from Syria, the elimination of sanctions and renewed diplomatic ties. The Biden administration revived these discrete talks in 2023, utilizing the Gulf state of Oman as an middleman.
