Austin Tice’s mother is told more engagement with Syria is needed to secure his return
Biden administration officials have told the mother of Austin Tice, a journalist missing in Syria for over a decade, that securing his return is “going to be a process” that could take several meetings with the Syrian government.
Speaking at the National Press Club on Tuesday, Debra Tice told reporters that career diplomats working on her son’s case have said it could take “quite a few meetings” to resolve it.
McClatchy reported in August of last year that secret contacts between the Biden administration and the Syrian government had quietly resumed over Tice. To date, the Syrian government has refused to offer any proof of life or information on Tice’s whereabouts.
Debra Tice could not say with confidence whether progress had been made, one year after she and her husband, Marc Tice, met with President Joe Biden in the Oval Office to discuss the fate of their son.
READ MORE: Secret contacts revive the search for Austin Tice, missing for 10 years in Syria
“Getting Austin home does not have to change our foreign policy,” Debra Tice told reporters at the press club, noting that Americans wrongfully detained in Venezuela and Russia, including professional basketball player Brittney Griner, were successfully brought home last year without any change in U.S. foreign policy.
“It’s going to take quite a few meetings to iron this out, and there’s any number of things that can be discussed — and I think we can figure out what those things are,” she said.
Tice, a Texas native and former U.S. Marine, was last seen at a checkpoint southwest of the Syrian capital of Damascus on Aug. 14, 2012. A video purportedly showing him alive and the captive of an unspecified group emerged six weeks later.
SEE: PHOTOS AUSTIN TICE TOOK IN SYRIA
He had traveled to Syria that summer as a freelance journalist and photographer for McClatchy, The Washington Post, and CBS, among other publications, and had planned to return home within days of his capture for his final year at Georgetown Law School.
Tice’s mother was in Washington this week for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where for the second year in a row she sat in the audience as Biden pledged to continue his administration’s quest to return her son home.
She wore the exact same dress that she had worn at last year’s dinner as a symbol that nothing had changed in the time that had passed.
Last year, her attendance at the dinner secured her a meeting with Biden. This year, she took meetings at the White House and State Department.
“The president gave a very clear directive to get a meeting, listen, find out what they want, and work with them,” Debra Tice told reporters at the press club on Tuesday, discussing her 2022 meeting with Biden and his directive to staff to engage with the Syrians. “I think the impediment is an unwillingness to take that listening and turn it into what we’re going to discuss with them.”
Debra Tice prefers working with the White House, she noted, because she believes the State Department is “exceedingly, profoundly anti-Syria — anti-engagement with Syria.”
At the correspondents’ dinner on Saturday, Biden said his administration would “keep the faith” for Tice’s return.
“She knows from our several conversations — the conversations with me and my senior staff — we are not giving up,” Biden said in a speech at the dinner, referring to Debra Tice. “As I told you at this dinner last year, as I told you in the Oval Office, you’ve raised an incredible son. When he was a kid, he was an Eagle Scout, a Big Brother, a born protector, a U.S. Marine — three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
“As a consequence of Austin showing the world the cost of war, he’s been detained in Syria for nearly 11 years,” Biden continued. “It’s simply wrong. It’s outrageous. And we are not ceasing our effort to get him, find him, and bring him home.”
This story was originally published May 2, 2023 at 3:24 PM.
