New Syria leaders say ‘search ongoing’ for abducted US journalist Austin Tice

In 2022, US President Joe Biden accused Syria of holding Tice, a freelance photojournalist detained near Damascus a decade earlier, and called on the now deposed Assad government to help secure his release.

The transitional government, which took the helm in Syria after Assad’s ouster on Sunday, said that “the search for American citizen Austin Tice is ongoing.”

“We confirm our readiness to cooperate directly with the US administration to search for American citizens disappeared by the former Assad regime,” the government’s department of political affairs added in a statement on Telegram.

In recent days, Syrian residents and armed men have broken into government prisons, freeing inmates, some of whom have spent decades behind bars.

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The political department’s statement said that another US citizen, Travis Timmerman, “has been released and secured”.

Tice was working for Agence France-Presse, McClatchy News, The Washington Post, CBS and other media outlets when he was detained at a checkpoint in Daraya, a suburb of Damascus, on August 14, 2012.

On Friday, the missing journalist’s mother Debra told reporters her son is believed to be alive and is being “treated well,” without providing further details.

The rebel forces, led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), appointed an interim prime minister on Tuesday to lead Syria until March, after they overthrew his government in a lightning offensive last week.

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Assad fled the country over the weekend, ending a half-century of his family’s iron-fisted rule.

Sunni Muslim HTS is rooted in Syria’s branch of Al-Qaeda and is proscribed as a terrorist organisation by many Western governments including the United States, though it has sought to moderate its rhetoric.