BEIRUT – Ten years after American journalist Austin Tice disappeared in Syria as the country plunged into a brutal civil war, and believed to have been held captive by President Bashar al-Assad’s government since then, his release remains elusive.
While one of his employers says efforts to secure his freedom are gaining momentum, his family remains unconvinced that the Biden administration is doing enough to pressure the Syrian government, in part because of the diplomatic complications arising from the lack of formal relations between the United States. States and Syria.
McClatchy, the US newspaper company for which the journalist worked as a freelancer, said this week that a multinational effort to free Tice is showing signs of revival and that there have been direct contacts between the US and Syrian governments.
A spokeswoman for McClatchy said Monday the progress was the culmination of intense activity by the Biden administration and the journalism industry leading up to the 10th anniversary of Mr. tice. But the company’s CEO, Tony Hunter, also recently said that there hadn’t been much movement on the matter since May.
“For McClatchy, this anniversary was an opportunity to shed light on Austin’s decade-long plight,” spokeswoman Susan Firey said. “And, in tandem, to shed light on the decades-long inaction of three administrations.”
Last week, Debra and Marc Tice, the parents of Mr. Tice, who disappeared outside Damascus in August 2012, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post noting the family weddings, graduations, and other family gatherings their son had missed in 10 years of captivity, and urged President Biden to step up diplomatic efforts to free him.
The Tice family did not respond to requests for an interview.
The United States has made “extensive efforts” to get Mr. Tice back to the United States, including by contacting Syrian officials directly and through third parties, according to a senior government official who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of Syrian officials. the case . However, the official said the Syrian government has not yet agreed to discuss Mr Tice’s case.
Last week, President Biden said in a statement that his administration has repeatedly asked the Syrian government to work with them to bring Mr Tice home.
“On the tenth anniversary of his kidnapping, I call on Syria to end this and help us bring him home,” President Biden said in the statement, adding that the United States was confident that the journalist was held by the Syrian government.
President Biden has said his administration has no higher priority than the release of American hostages and those wrongly held abroad.
If he is still alive, as the United States thinks he is, Mr. Tice, a former Marine Corps infantry officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, would be one of the longest-held American hostages abroad, a captivity that has spread all over the world. three US governments. He would have turned 41 on August 11.
Tice, who was a freelancer for both The Washington Post and McClatchy and other media outlets when he was kidnapped, had been in Syria for months, joining in with and writing about opposition rebels as an anti-government uprising turned into civil war. Syria has long maintained that it is not holding Mr Tice and has no information about him.
Attempts to secure his release have been complicated by the fact that the United States has suspended diplomatic relations with Syria as a result of the Assad regime’s brutal crackdown on dissent.
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Mr. Tice’s parents met President Biden at the White House on May 2, where he instructed his senior national security personnel to contact the Syrian government directly, according to the article they wrote in the Washington Post.
Weeks after that meeting, Lebanon’s security chief Abbas Ibrahim came to Washington and met with officials from the Biden administration and the CIA, according to Nizar Zakka, president of Hostage Aid Worldwide. His organization has spent the past two years helping Mr. Ibrahim and the United States find clues related to Mr. Tice, he said.
The purpose of the meeting was to find a way to make progress with the Syrians, who have always been evasive when asked about Mr. Tice, Zakka said.
Mr Ibrahim has been credited with negotiating the release of several Westerners from the Middle East, including an American and a Canadian from Syria, as well as Mr Zakka, a Lebanese citizen who has been held in Iran for four years and accused of spying for the United States .
After meeting in Washington, Mr. Ibrahim went to Damascus and met Syrian officials there, but the meeting went nowhere, Mr Zakka said.
The Tice family still demand direct contact between the Biden administration and the Syrian government, rejecting the Foreign Ministry’s alleged concerns over the high-level recognition of President Assad.
In 2014, Debra Tice spent nearly three months in Damascus “knocking on doors, making phone calls, and doing everything possible to find out where Austin is.” Finally, she received a message from a senior Syrian government official: “I will not meet the mother. Send a United States government official with the appropriate title.”
The US government has made numerous efforts over the years to secure the release of Mr. Tice, largely under President Trump, who made the release of US prisoners and hostages around the world a priority.
In 2017, in the first year of Mr Trump’s administration, the White House set up a back channel to communicate with the Syrian government. In February of that year, Mike Pompeo, then the CIA director, spoke on the phone with Ali Mamlouk, the intelligence chief of the Syrian National Security Agency, which is under US sanctions.
The government then sent an intermediary to meet with Mr. Mamlouk and deliver an unsigned letter from the US government. That communication fell apart after the Syrian government carried out a chemical gas attack in rebel-held northern Syria and the United States responded with a missile attack on a Syrian airport.
In August 2018, a top CIA agency official with Middle East expertise met Mr Mamlouk in Damascus and raised Mr Tice’s case.
Two years later, senior U.S. officials, including Roger D. Carstens, the State Department’s special envoy for hostage situations, met with Mr. Mamlouk again in Damascus to attempt the release of both Mr. Tice and another U.S. citizen, Majd. to accomplish. Kamalmaz, a Syrian-born psychotherapist who was taken at a checkpoint in 2017.
Nor has the Syrian government acknowledged the detention of Mr Kamalmaz.
Months after the meeting, a US official said efforts to secure the release of both men were at an early stage.
Relying on such back-channels and intermediaries due to the lack of US diplomatic relations with Syria has made those efforts very complicated. The United States closed its embassy in Damascus in 2012 and closed the Syrian embassy in Washington in 2014, suspending diplomatic relations between the two countries.
The United States has also imposed sanctions on Syrian military and political officials for human rights violations, as well as on Syrian companies and banks.
In the op-ed they wrote, Mr. Tice’s parents called the obstacles called by the US governments “apologies.” They welcomed Mr Biden’s encouraging words, but said their son needed more than that after 10 years of captivity.
“He needs our government to turn the president’s words into action,” they wrote. “He has to go home.”
Zolan Kanno Youngs reporting contributed.
