Secret Intel Proves Assad Regime Held Journalist Austin Tice
There has been no word from Tice in 13 years.
Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made.
As of this writing, American freelance journalist Austin Tice has been held captive in Syria for 4,676 days, 5 hours, 4 minutes and 43 seconds, according to a website set up by his family. But as of today, his family finally has a critical answer about what happened to him after he was captured in August 2012, a few days before his 31st birthday.
Detained at a checkpoint in a suburb of Damascus while heading to Lebanon, Tice fell off the map — until a few weeks later, when a YouTube video was posted showing him bound and being forced to his knees as men in turbans shouted, “Allahu Akbar.” Despite the familiar setup, experts said they believed the video was staged and meant to steer blame for Tice’s abduction toward a fictional Islamic extremist group.
After that, silence. No one has heard from Tice in the 13 years since.
No group or government has ever claimed responsibility for the kidnapping, but just before the 10-year anniversary of Tice’s disappearance, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, President Joe Biden said in a statement that “the U.S. government knew ‘with certainty’ that Tice ‘has been held’ by the then-government of Syria.”
Today, the BBC published a story saying that it has uncovered top secret intelligence files that confirm that yes, Tice had been in government custody. The BBC used several former regime officials as further sourcing. This is the first evidence uncovered about Tice’s whereabouts since the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in early December 2024.
Tice wrote for outlets like The Washington Post, McClatchy, Al-Jazeera English and others. He was also a former captain in the United States Marine Corps who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a law student at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
He went to Syria early on in the war, when few foreign correspondents were reporting from the country. Often, foreign journalists have a better field of protection around them than locals, but in Tice’s case, he fell prey to the other, harder truth of being a foreign correspondent: He became a “‘card’ that could be played in diplomatic negotiations with the U.S.,” the BBC writes. A former member of the National Defense Forces with “intimate knowledge” of Tice’s detention told the outlet that “Austin’s value was understood.”
However, this so-called value seems to have done little to protect him in his captivity, and now that the government has fallen and Syria’s torturous prisons have been emptied out with no sign of Tice, he may very well be one of the more than 100,000 people estimated to have been disappeared under the Assad regime.
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So hard to hit like for this essay. The torture of not knowing where your loved one is, whether they are even alive, is beyond my comprehension. There must be people who do know where he is, but this essay is the first I've heard of him in years. He is off of our radar screens, so we disappeared him too. The parents of Hersh Polin Goldberg didn't let that happen - and even though we now know his fate, they are still advocates for all hostages held throughout the world.
I'm hoping this is the beginning of the resolution of Austin Tice's whereabouts.