Austin Tice — The marine held hostage for eight years
Former U.S. marine Austin Tice was taken hostage in Syria in 2012
Former Marine Captain Austin Tice disappeared in August 2012 while working as a freelance journalist in the Syrian war zone. To put that in some perspective, he disappeared around the time that President Obama was preparing for the Democratic National Convention that would propel him towards a historic second term, and hasn’t been seen since.
In Syria, the brutal civil war was in full flow, a conflict that shows no signs of abating. As the people of Aleppo, Damascus, Homs and Idlib found themselves on the bloody frontline, even those reporting the conflict were at risk, with 60 international journalists thought to have perished in the region since the conflict began.
In August 2012, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had just returned from Istanbul, where she had been holding talks on the Syrian situation with Turkish leaders. Meanwhile, Britain had just announced plans to give £5m worth of equipment to Syrian rebels trying to topple President Bashar Al-Assad.
In September 2012, just a few weeks after he went missing, a 47-second video was released showing a blindfolded and bound Tice being held hostage, apparently by a band of Islamic militants. He was clearly in a state of some distress.
Nothing has been seen nor heard of him since.
The origins of the war in Syria
By 2011, the lack of freedoms and economic hardships (including severe drought from 2007–2010) endured in Syria was taking its toll on the impoverished population. The Arab Spring of 2011, which led to the overthrow of president’s of Tunisia and Eqypt, gave hope to pro-democracy activists in Syria, but the Assad government’s harsh response (15 boys were detained and tortured for writing graffiti in support of the Arab Spring, one of whom, just 13-years-old, died after being brutally tortured) inflamed public anger further.
The Syrian government, led by President Bashar al-Assad, responded to the protests by killing hundreds of demonstrators and imprisoning many more. While the protests in 2011 were mostly non-sectarian in nature, the subsequent conflict exposed deep-seated sectarian divisions in the region.
In July 2011, defectors from the Syrian military announced the formation of the Free Syrian Army, a rebel group aiming to overthrow the Assad regime. In 2015, Russia entered the conflict and has been Assad’s main ally ever since, while the U.S. armed anti-Assad rebel groups and led an international coalition bombing Islamic State targets in Syria.
The figures are stark. More than 465,000 Syrians have been killed in the conflict, over a million injured, and over 12 million — half Syria’s prewar population — have been displaced.
Who was Austin Tice and what was he doing in Syria?
Tice was clearly an exceptional young man. From Houston, Texas, at the age of 16 he attended the University of Houston before transferring to and graduating from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
After graduating, he served as an infantaryman in the United States Marine Corps and, between 2005 and 2015, completed two deployments to Iraq and one to Afghanistan. At the time of his capture, he was finishing law school at Georgetown University, while reporting on the Syrian conflict for news outlets such as McClatchy, the Washington Post and CBS News.
When was he last seen?
In his last published article before he disappeared, filed on the 31 July 2012, the 6 foot 3 inch, 220lb former marine described how he donned a niqab in order to smuggle himself into the war-torn city of Damascus. There followed a hair-raising dash through a military check-point, before finally arriving at a rebel safe house in time for iftar — the sundown meal during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
It is thought that Tice was kidnapped just a couple of weeks later, on 14 August 2012, as he began a trip from Damascus, from where he’d been reporting for several weeks, to Beirut, the Lebanese capital.
How has Washington responsed?
The U.S. government has offered a reward of up to $1 million for information leading to Tice’s release.
In March 2020, President Trump himself took up the case, imploring the Syrian government to work with America to secure Tice’s release. On August 14, Secretary Pompeo tweeted: “The Trump Administration remains committed to bringing home all U.S. citizens held hostage or wrongfully detained overseas. Austin Tice’s release and return home are long, long overdue. We will do our utmost to achieve that goal.”
American security and intelligence officials believe the Syrian government or its allies are responsible for Tice kidnapping. In recent years sporadic discussions have taken place between American officials and members of the Assad regime, during which the fate of Tice has been raised. Even the Russians have been employed to exert whatever influence they have in Syria to bring Austin home. So far, the Syrian authorities have rejected any requests to intervene in the affair.
What next?
Despite hearing nothing from their son since the release of the short video in 2012, Tice’s parents are adamant that he is still alive and continue to campaign for his release.
It is certainly not unprecedented for hostages to be released after such a long period in captivity. During the Lebanon hostage crisis Terry Waite, an Anglican church envoy, spent nearly five years in captivity before finally being released in 1991. Floyd James Thompson, an American Army colonel spent nearly nine years in captivity in the jungle camps and mountains of South Vietnam and Laos. He was finally released in 1973.
Conclusion
With more than 60 journalists killed in Syria since the conflict began, one may question the wisdom of deploying journalists to that war-torn region. But war correspondents provide a vital public service. For the first casualty of war is truth, and brave independent-minded journalists, men and women like Austin Tice, are vital in preserving that truth.
