Austin Tice was detained at a checkpoint near Damascus in 2012. He has now been held captive for 13 years.
HOUSTON — Thursday marked 13 years since Houston-raised journalist Austin Tice was abducted in Syria.
More than a decade later, there’s still no sign of him.
He was detained at a checkpoint near Damascus in 2012 while covering the civil war in Syria. Since his disappearance, Tice’s family has been working tirelessly to find answers and uncover the truth.
According to Tice’s mother, Debra Tice, within the last year, the United States government decided to share information with them about her son’s case.
She said the information was only shared with the family.
“This was information (sent) to the US government, (provided) by the US government, only about Austin Tice in eight 4-inch binders. We looked at them for 17 hours over two days,” Debra Tice said.
She said they learned a lot about Austin’s detention that they didn’t know before.
“Our government had information, almost every single day of Austin Tice’s detention — who had him. When he had something with his teeth, they took him to the dentist. When he had some stomach issues, they took him to the doctor,” Debra Tice said.
She went on to say that the notion that the Syrian government didn’t say they had Austin didn’t make sense.
On the day that marked the 13th year Austin Tice had been missing, during a conference hosted by the Freedom Press Center, an organization that supports journalists who face threats on the job, Debra Tice’s frustrations continued when she talked about the confusion and lack of transparency from the US government about her son’s return.
“The Syrian government tried this in 2016 and the Syrian government tried this in 2020, and there was no response and there was no response from the United States government,” she said.
While no brand new information was revealed during the conference, Austin Tice’s family said they remain committed to keeping his case in the headlines.
Austin Tice is officially the longest-detained American journalist who is still missing.
On Christmas Eve last year, the head of an international aid group for hostages said they believed Austin Tice was alive.
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