Kidnapped journalist Austin Tice went missing in Syria 12 years ago. The Assad regime collapse has renewed hopes he may be alive

Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Get our free Inside Washington email SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. 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.” open image in gallery 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’ 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. “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. 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.