‘Top priority’: US renews push to find Austin Tice after al-Assad toppled
Al Jazeera
The US journalist is believed to be among 135,000 people detained or disappeared by Syrian government during war.
The United States has renewed its efforts to locate missing journalist Austin Tice in Syria in the immediate aftermath of the toppling of the country’s longtime leader Bashar al-Assad in a surprise offensive.
Just a day after opposition fighters led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group took control of Damascus, White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said on Monday that finding Tice is a “top priority”.
Also on Monday, the FBI reupped a $1m reward for “information that leads to Austin’s safe return”.
Sullivan said with al-Assad having fled the country and his regime collapsed, Washington is seeking to “locate the prison where [Tice] may be held, get him out, get him home safely to his family”.
Tice has been missing since 2012 when he was abducted in Damascus while reporting on the popular uprising against al-Assad. Efforts to locate the former US marine, who was working as a freelance journalist at the time of his disappearance, have been fruitless as the bloody war stretched on.
