The mom of Austin Tice, a contract journalist taken captive in Syria 9 years in the past, mentioned the White Home stays a “hurdle” to bringing her son house.
Tice, a former Marine captain from Texas who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, is amongst roughly half a dozen US residents although to have been seized by the Syrian authorities or allied forces.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken singled out Tice on Wednesday in a tweet that highlighted the imprisonment of greater than 350 journalists worldwide. Inside days of his affirmation in February, Blinken held a video name with the family members of unlawfully imprisoned People, promising to prioritize their launch.
“The hurdle I’m having is the White Home,” Debra Tice mentioned throughout a press convention Thursday on the Nationwide Press Membership in Washington, DC.
Tice mentioned she hasn’t been capable of meet with President Joe Biden or his nationwide safety adviser, Jake Sullivan, to debate her son’s plight. Her frustration was echoed in an open letter published in October by a gaggle of greater than two dozen households of hostages and wrongfully detained People, who mentioned they have been denied White Home conferences.
Tice has spent the previous 5 weeks in Washington assembly with different US officers, which she described as productive.
Nevertheless, “the issues we’re discussing need to go up the chain, in any other case we actually are simply having tea and crumpets,” she mentioned.
Final week, Sullivan advised a gaggle of US hostage households throughout a digital assembly reported on by Axios that he can be prepared to fulfill with them in individual. Tice mentioned she’s since requested a gathering.
The backstory: Tice traveled to Syria the summer time earlier than his remaining yr at Georgetown Regulation to cowl the nation’s civil struggle as a contract journalist for retailers that included McClatchy, CBS and The Washington Submit. Three days after his thirty first birthday, Tice disappeared on Aug. 14, 2012 after his taxi was stopped at a checkpoint in a Damascus suburb.
Little is publicly recognized about his whereabouts or well-being, apart from a 47-second clip that surfaced 5 weeks after his disappearance, and which analysts imagine may need been staged.
What’s the newest: An absence of formal diplomatic relations with Syria has sophisticated US authorities efforts to carry Tice house. The Trump administration tried various backchannels and in late 2020, White Home official Kash Patel and Roger Carstens, the US particular envoy for hostage affairs, traveled to Damascus for rare negotiations on the detained People. The pair met with Syria’s sanctioned-intelligence chief Ali Mamlouk, whose calls for the Associated Press reported included a full US troop pullout from Syria, the elimination of sanctions and renewed diplomatic ties.
Debra Tice known as on the present administration to construct on the key talks between Mamlouk and US officers, and the work of Lebanon’s high safety chief, Abbas Ibrahim. The well-connected Lebanese basic has labored to free the US detainees, and in 2019 efficiently negotiated the discharge of Sam Goodwin, an American vacationer held in a Syrian jail for 2 months.
“You may’t drop this ball. We’ve had an ask from the Syrians,” Tice mentioned. “Doorways are opening a bit, and we have to shove these doorways open and pull Austin out.”
“He’s an American citizen that wants his authorities to step in and do what they know is critical to carry him house,” Tice mentioned.
What they’re saying: In response to a query from Al-Monitor, State Division spokesperson Ned Value declined to say particularly whether or not the Biden administration would contemplate a direct dialogue with the Syrian regime to press for Tice’s return, however mentioned the US can “separate the thought of diplomacy and our efforts to free People who’re held abroad.”
“The best way we see it, we are able to have conversations pertaining to People and we are able to have conversations with regimes with which we have now poor relations, or in some circumstances probably no relations in any respect,” Value mentioned.
Know extra: The household of Majd Kamalmaz, a psychotherapist from Virginia lacking in Syria since 2017, is also pinning its hopes on Biden. His daughter, Maryam Kamalmaz, mentioned she has written letters to Blinken, Biden and Sullivan and is ready for a response.
