Column: Amid the chaos of Syria, an American family seeks to bring a missing son home
- Austin Tice was taken captive in Syria 12 years ago and is believed to be alive.
- For the last week, his family has gathered in Washington to push for his release now that President Bashar Assad has been ousted.
Hello and happy Thursday. American journalist Austin Tice has been held captive in Syria for 4,504 days, but his family is, for the first time in many years, feeling optimistic that he might soon be free.
You may have read about Austin Tice in a recent spate of news coverage since the dictatorship of Bashar Assad collapsed after an assault by rebels that surprised the world.
Austin was a former Marine captain from Houston about to start his final year in law school, working as a freelance journalist covering the start of the Syrian civil war. He was on his way out of Syria when he was detained at a checkpoint. Weeks later, a video clip of him emerged, blindfolded and disheveled, held at gunpoint by unknown men.
Since then, nothing.
I had the chance to talk with the Tice family Wednesday as they gathered in an Airbnb in Arlington, Va. — the first time the Tices have all been together since the COVID-19 pandemic, and the first time all of them have talked to a journalist at once. The one word that seemed to define this moment for them was “overwhelming.”
As war correspondents flock to Syria to catch up on the stunning story, the Tice family has launched their own offensive: to ensure that Austin’s plight isn’t overlooked in this chaos, when so many Syrian families are searching for their own loved ones. The Syrian Network for Human Rights estimates 157,000 people were swept up in Assad’s crackdown.
Right now there is a narrow window of opportunity for for access, information — and hopefully Austin’s return. No one knows who will ultimately take charge in Syria, or what the relationship with the United States will be. But in these days while the future is taking shape, the Tices believe they have a unique chance. After years of nothing, it is a moment of something.
“We know that he’s alive,” Debra, his mother, told me. “We can bring Austin Tice home. Go get him. Get it done.”
Since her eldest son went missing, she has visited the Capitol many times to beg, plead and demand that the U.S. government do more — sometimes with her husband, Marc, but often alone. It has been a slow and often dispiriting campaign.
Four years after Austin was captured, then-President Obama finally met with them. Four years after that, then-President Trump put out a statement saying the U.S. “will not rest until we bring Austin home.”
But Austin remained in Syria. In 2022, President Biden met with the family. And still, nothing, though there were reports of secret talks.
In the summer this year, long before any hint of a Syrian uprising, Debra began arranging for her entire family — Austin has six siblings and six nieces and nephews, many of whom he’s never met — to go to Washington.
Surely, she thought, this brood would cause more of a stir with State Department bureaucrats and elected officials than one mother on a seemingly endless, lonely quest. At the very least, said Simon, the youngest of the siblings at 31 — the age Austin was when he was kidnapped — she wouldn’t have to experience “the frustration by herself.”
She had T-shirts made for this difficult reunion, in dark green, with a picture of Austin in the center and the words “Free my son,” “Free my brother” or “Free my uncle” at the top, depending on who would be wearing it. She wanted to force everyone they met to see him as her family does.
“You have to know that he’s my son or my brother or my uncle or my brother-in-law, you have to know that in the meetings,” she said. “You can’t avoid it.”
But like so many times when she was alone, the meetings didn’t provide the answers the family wanted. Whispers were already coming out of Syria that something was happening, first in the northern city of Aleppo, but moving south toward the capital, Damascus, day by day.
Naomi, the second-youngest sibling, said State Department and White House officials seemed to use this intelligence to put the family off.
It “kind of gave them an opportunity to really avoid a lot of those questions,” she said. “They were almost using it to excuse the fact that, like, they hadn’t been able to do this in the last 12 years. And I think that was really frustrating, because it did just kind of feel like avoidance, right?”
She told me she had always looked up to her brother, depended on him.
“I would always run any kind of life decision by him, and so not being able to do that, and not having his advice, and not knowing which direction he would point me in has been really difficult,” she said.
Really, all of the siblings have had to find ways to keep going every day, not knowing what their brother was experiencing — a part of their lives suspended while everything else moved on.
Meagan, the second oldest after Austin, is a hairstylist in Houston. He has never met her 7-year-old daughter, but the girl knows everything about her absent uncle.
“She talks about him a lot and asks a lot of questions and brings him up often,” she said. “We can’t pause time, nor would Austin want us to, but he’s still very much a part of our lives and our conversations.”
They each remember him in their own way.
Debra: “Strong-willed, in the best way.”
Marc: “Impassioned.”
Meagan: Stubborn and strong.
Naomi: “Trailblazer.”
Jon: “A force to be reckoned with.”
Jacob: “Magnetic.”
Simon: “Protective.”
Abby: “As the shortest sibling, my word would be tall.”
Saturday night, the day after the official meetings, including with White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan, and a news conference at the National Press Club, the family was back at the hotel. News began to trickle in that rebels had entered Damascus.
Meagan remembers thinking it was “wild,” because her sister had asked officials earlier in the day if it was possible Damascus was in danger.
“Do I need to be checking my phone all the time,” she said Naomi asked. “Or do you think nothing is going to happen overnight?”
Meagan said officials seemed certain there was no chance of a coup, telling the family, “‘Probably nothing’s going happen the rest of the weekend. You can sleep. Don’t really worry about it.’”
Then, “three hours later, Damascus was taken over. I mean, it was, it was really insane,” she said.
The family gathered in Jacob’s room — the neatest and quietest, with no sleeping kids to bother. They set up “their own little command central,” Meagan said, monitoring the news and calling contacts made over the years, desperate for news and a way to help.
Biden said during a news briefing Sunday: “We think we can get him back, but we have no direct evidence of that yet.”
The State Department said it has reached out to Hayat Tahrir al Sham, known as HTS, the rebel group responsible for overthrowing the Assad government.
“We continue to make clear in all of our conversations, either with entities on the ground in Syria or with entities that may be in communication with those on the ground in Syria, that we have no higher priority than the safe return of Austin Tice to his family,” department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in a briefing Tuesday.
Roger Carstens, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, has traveled to the Middle East to work on freeing him. And members of a private group the Tices have worked with are on the ground in Syria, checking locations where they believe he might be found.
There is “an intense feeling of hope, joy and anticipation,” said Marc, Austin’s father. But also, a sense of urgency.
And the agony of the wait.
The family planned to leave Washington this weekend, but most are staying, “going kind of from place to place, building to building, camera to camera, trying to get our message out as loudly and as broadly as we possibly can,” Jacob said.
Sunday morning they gathered at the historic St. John’s Church near the White House, which every president since James Madison has visited. Being together after so long has been wonderful, the family said, but also makes Austin’s absence more profound.
“Austin is going to walk free,” his mother said. “We stand ready to put our arms around him until he has the strength to move into the rest of his life.”
What else you should be reading:
The must-read: Biden says US believes Austin Tice is alive after 2012 disappearance in Syria
The what’s next: Colleges Warn Foreign Students to Get to Campus Before Trump Takes Office
The L.A. Times special: Luigi Mangione went ‘radio silent,’ was reported missing in San Francisco. Then CEO was killed
Stay golden,
Anita Chabria
P.S.: Here’s a great piece on Austin Tice, done awhile back by the folks at the McClatchy D.C. bureau. He freelanced for McClatchy, as well as the Washington Post.
Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
