“This is either gonna be wildly successful or a complete disaster,” Austin Tice wrote in May 2012, on the eve of a dangerous journey to bear witness to history. “Here goes nothing.”
Tice, a physically towering former Marine and fledgling journalist, threw himself with grit and resolve into war zones, friendships and the injustices he cared deeply about.
But he is yet to return from that journey. Tice disappeared in Syria two months after setting off to cover the country’s crippling civil war, sparking a 13-year mystery that has tortured his Texan family and plagued Washington’s relationship with Syria’s brutal former dictator, Bashar al-Assad.
For more than a decade, nobody has seen or heard from Tice. His family has never lost hope that he is alive, even as successive administrations – from President Obama to President Trump – failed to bring him home.
But in December, Assad’s repressive regime – which had always denied capturing or killing Tice – collapsed in an instant. And in the chaotic months since, clues about Tice’s fate have begun to seep through the walls of Syria’s once-impenetrable prisons and palaces.
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