The scores of prisoners freed after the downfall of the Bashar Assad regime in Syria are giving hope to Debra Tice, mother of the American journalist Austin Tice, who has been missing since being detained in 2012.
"It’s almost like having a rehearsal, you know? Just an inkling of what it’s going to really feel like when it is Austin walking free," Tice told NBC News’s Meet the Press on Sunday.
She’s been closely following reports out of the country, where another missing American, religious pilgrim Travis Timmerman, was found in the town of Dhiyabiya, after being held for seven months. Initial reports wrongly identified him as Tice.
"My oldest daughter came into my room at 4:25, and said, ‘Mom, you know, we have this video. You need to look at it. We don’t think it’s Austin, but a lot of people think it’s Austin, so we want you to look and see if it’s Austin,’" Debra Tice said on Meet the Press. "I took a glance and I said, ‘No, that is not Austin.’"
The White House has said it believes Tice is still alive and pledged to keep search for him.
“We believe he’s alive,” President Joe Biden said last week after the fall of Assad. “We think we can get him back, but we have no direct evidence of that yet.”
Tice, a former Marine Corps captain and law student, went to Syria to report on the civil war consuming the country, even though he had little journalism experience.
“He was hearing reports from Syria saying ‘this is happening … but it can’t be confirmed because there really are no reporters on the ground,’” his father, Marc Tice, told The Daily Star 10 months after his son’s disappearance.
“And he said, ‘You know, this is a story that the world needs to know about.’"
Tice embedded with the Free Syrian Army rebel group and ended up filing dispatches and making appearances for McClatchy newspapers, The Washington Post, the BBC, and CBS News.
As he headed towards the Lebanese border ahead of a planned break, Tice was detained in a government-controlled area and hasn’t been seen since. The State Department has said it believes Tice was being held by the Syrian government, which the Assad regime denied.
Tice is now the longest-held American journalist in U.S. history.
A former regime prisoner told NBC News he was held in a cell across from Tice and saw him alive as recently as July 2022, while the new government has said it’s actively seeking information on Tice.
Families throughout the region are similarly searching for news of family members who were detained, tortured, or disappeared by the brutal regime.
