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