The nonprofit Hostage Aid Worldwide, one of the teams searching for American journalist Austin Tice in Syria, said Tuesday it believes he is still alive.
Nizar Zakka, head of the International Hostage Assistance Organization, said, quoted by Agence France-Presse: “We have data that Austin is alive until January 2024, but the American president said in August that he is alive, and we are sure that he is alive.” alive today.” AFP.
“We are trying to be as transparent as possible and share as much information as possible,” he said at a news conference on Tuesday in Damascus, but did not provide information about where Tice might be.
Earlier this week, Roger Carstens, the US hostage envoy, said the network of secret prisons run by the former Syrian government is more extensive than the United States realized and is complicating efforts to find Tice.
The US government initially estimated that Syria had between 10 and 20 secret prisons, but there may be 40 or more, Carstens told reporters on Friday after a short trip to the Syrian capital, Damascus.
“I was somewhat amazed at the amount of secret prisons that Assad seemed to have amassed,” Carstens said. “They are sometimes in small groups. Sometimes they are as far away as Damascus.”
The size of the prison network made it difficult to locate Tice, according to Carstens.
We haven’t seen him since 2012
Tice, 43, worked for Agence France-Presse and McClatchy News. The Washington PostAnd CBS and other media in Syria.
Tice, a Texan and former US Marine, has been detained in Syria since 2012, when he was arrested at a checkpoint in Damascus. Other than a short video clip after his arrest, little has been heard or seen of him.
Over the past 12 years, the U.S. government has identified about a half-dozen prisons where Tice is believed to have been located, Carstens said. But the new information means up to three more facilities have been added to the list.
Limited resources make verification a difficult task, Carstens said. Without enough US government personnel on the ground, NGOs, journalists and the Syrian transitional government are searching for Tice.
“In an ideal world, we would find Austin and bring him home, and we would stop the search,” Carstens said. He added: “We will not stop until we find the information we need to find out what happened to Austin, where he is, to return him home to his family.”
The overthrow of Assad gives hope
Following the collapse of Assad’s government this month, thousands of prisoners were released from government-run facilities. This raised hopes among the Tice family that Austin would be among them.
“I feel like we’re standing in line, and we’re not the only ones still standing in line,” Debra Tice, Tice’s mother, told reporters Monday. “We just need to open all those prisons and reunite all those families, including us.”
Tice is the American journalist who has spent the longest time abroad.
Shortly before the fall of the Assad government, the Tice family revealed that they had received information from a source vetted by the US government that confirmed that Austin was alive and being held in the Damascus area.
