Kidnapped journalist Austin Tice, missing for 12 years, once said going to Syria was ‘the greatest thing I’ve done’

The recent fall of the Assad regime has infused new hope in the search for Austin Tice, an American detained in Syria for a decade, as prisoners in jails across the country are released, Gustaf Kilander writes

In late May 2012, Austin Tice, a former Marine Corps captain and Georgetown law student, ducked under a fence on the Turkish-Syrian border.

The 31-year-old joined a group of Free Syrian Army rebels, and despite not having much journalism experience, filed his first news report nine days later. Writing for McClatchy, which owns papers across the U.S., Tice later reported for The Washington Post and appeared on BBC Radio and CBS News.

After 83 days in the country, he headed for Beirut, Lebanon to take a break. But while driving towards the Lebanese border, Tice was detained in a government-controlled area. After being missing for 12 years, Tice is now the longest-held American journalist in history.

The recent fall of the Assad regime has infused new hope in the search for Tice, as prisoners in jails across the country have been released. “We’re feeling very hopeful,” his mother Debra Tice said this week in an interview with ABC News. “We’re waiting, and not exactly on pins and needles, but just very expectantly.”

Tice grew up in Houston, Texas, the oldest of seven siblings. An Eagle Scout, he dreamed of one day becoming an international correspondent for NPR. When he was 16, he attended the University of Houston for a year before transferring to the Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He later joined the Marines as an infantry officer, going on tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. Leaving duty as a captain, he remained in the Marine Corps Reserve.

“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, said 10 months after his son’s disappearance to The Daily Star. “And he said, ‘You know, this is a story that the world needs to know about.’"

Tice attended two years of law school at Georgetown before heading to Syria between his second and third years. At the time, he was one of few foreign journalists to report on the civil war as it was heating up. Tice reported from the battlefields after arriving in May 2012, becoming one of the first American journalists to be present for clashes between rebels and the army. His Twitter account racked up about 2,000 followers before he stopped posting on August 11, 2012.

Austin Tice has been detained in Syria for more than a decade (Austinticefamily.com)

His mother, Debra Tice, has moved for months at a time to Washington and Damascus in her search for her son, whom she homeschooled along with his six younger siblings. Speaking to Texas Monthly in 2022, she said the difference between her past life of “diapers and spaghetti” and the search for her son over the previous decade couldn’t be more stark.

In a 2014 letter published in The Washington Post, Marc and Debra called him “the most devoted son, brother, uncle, and friend any of us could ever ask for.”

“From your earliest days as an Eagle Scout, a top student, a terrific athlete, and a caring friend and neighbor, we knew you were a special kid,” they added. “When you put your Georgetown Law education on hold to follow your journalistic dreams, we knew you were extraordinary.”

Marc Tice told Scouting Magazine that his son was a member of Houston Troop 266, where he earned the Eagle Scout award.

“Scouting was important to Austin, and he is very proud of achieving his Eagle,” Marc Tice wrote, according to the official site of the magazine. “We all recognize the positive impact of Scouting in forming Austin into the man he is today.”

Tice, now 43, took part in several summer camps at El Rancho Cima in the Texas Hill Country and enjoyed the outdoors. He “hiked at Philmont, sailed at the Florida Sea Base, and canoed the Boundary Waters,” the site stated.

Debra Tice told the Houston Matters radio program in August 2014 that her son’s interest in journalism was sparked from a very young age, recalling how he inked his knees crawling across the Sunday paper as a small child.

Marc and Debra Tice, Austin Tice’s parents, hold dated portraits of him at a press conference in the Lebanese capital Beirut on July 20, 2017 (AFP via Getty Images)

“He’s actually been published in every publication of every school that he has attended,” she said at the time. “So, I would say there’s always been that writing in his blood.”

“As a family, we never watched much TV, but we listened to a lot of radio, and we read a lot, and ... our family table was somewhere that we sat and talked about issues, local issues, national issues, international issues, so ... I think that contributed to his ending up working as a freelance journalist,” Marc Tice added.

KUHF, the public radio station in Houston, broadcast a phone interview with Tice on August 13, 2012. That was the last day he was in touch with his editors before his disappearance. He spoke about seeing rebels using Molotov cocktails and “any weapon you can basically imagine in an urban street fighting environment.”

“It was pretty exciting! But I was able to get some pretty good shots that way and tell a pretty good story afterward, that I think otherwise … never would have gotten told,” Tice added at the time, according to Texas Monthly. 

On his LinkedIn page, Tice wrote that his background is as an infantry officer in the Marines and that while he went to law school, he would “prefer to be a journalist.”

“To that end, I went to Syria in the summer of 2012 to cover the war there. Had some decent professional success,” he wrote. “I would prefer to work for one organization over freelancing. I can write, film, snap and speak, so if your organization is looking for an all-in-one crisis correspondent willing to get the stories others won’t, call me. I speak passable Spanish and I’m slowly getting there with Arabic.”

He added: “I’m not so great behind a desk.”

The site lists his skills as being military leadership, weapons, digital photography, legal research, and “jokes.”

Debra Tice speaking at the National Press Club on May 3, 2024, in Washington D.C. She has said that writing has always been in her son’s ‘blood’ (Getty Images)

Even though Tice had military experience, many of his loved ones expressed concern about his work in Syria. On July 25, 2012, Tice wrote on Facebook: “It’s nice and all, but please quit telling me to be safe.”

He said he was posting on the social media platform against his “better judgment” and urged friends and followers to “flame away.” Tice said he was doing “this crazy thing” and told his followers to “keep asking what’s wrong with me for coming here.”

“Our granddads stormed Normandy and Iwo Jima and defeated global fascism,” he added at the time, weeks before his arrest. “Neil Armstrong flew to the Moon in a glorified trashcan, doing math on a clipboard as he went.”

Tice argued in that post that America had lost its “pioneering spirit.”

“We became a fat, weak, complacent, coddled, unambitious and cowardly nation,” he wrote. “I went off to two wars with misguided notions of patriotism and found in both that the first priority was to never get killed, something we could have achieved from our living rooms in America with a lot less hassle.”

He claimed Americans were killing themselves with McDonald’s, alcohol, and “other drugs,” having lost the sense that there are things “worth dying for.”

Tice, who was about to turn 31 at the time, wrote that those fighting in the Syrian civil war were “alive in a way that almost no Americans today even know how to be. They live with greater passion and dream with greater ambition because they are not afraid of death.”

“Neither were our granddads. Neither was Neil Armstrong. And neither am I,” he added.

Less than a month before his detention, Tice spoke to the News 88.7 radio station, pointing out that his sources could be retaliated against for speaking to him.

“There’s a very real security concern,” he said at the time. “People are concerned about their faces showing up in photographs because the Syrian government is notorious for exerting pressure on people by going after their families in really quite violent and atrocious ways.”

A photo from July 2012 showing Tice in Syria (AFP via Getty Images)

Two years later, his parents told Houston Matters that Tice also knew of the risks he was taking.

“He was definitely aware, because his mom kept him aware, his journalistic colleagues kept him aware,” Debra Tice said at the time. “I think he chose not to focus on that for himself. I don’t think he was careless in any way. But I don’t think that was his main focus.”

“Since Austin went to Syria, we have learned a lot and developed an incredible respect for people like him to do that job because, to a large degree, they have to forget about themselves in order to get the job done,” Marc Tice added. “And he would send us photographs with the faces of people around him blurred out for that very reason. When you’re the reporter, you’re the face of this information to the world, you can’t really hide yourself.”

His father went on to say that it “wasn’t unusual” for “journalists in the field to lose touch … because of the way they had to move from place to place.”

He added: “So, you know, a couple of days, I thought, ‘yeah, this is worrisome, but not terrible. But after two days, I contacted his editors and they said, ‘Yeah, we’re concerned too.’”

In his 25 July 2012 Facebook post, Tice said he didn’t have a “death wish” but a “life wish.”

Life in Syria meant “more than anywhere I’ve ever been — because every single day people here lay down their own for the sake of others,” he wrote.

“Coming here to Syria is the greatest thing I’ve ever done, and it’s the greatest feeling of my life,” Tice said.