Edan Alexander gets tearful hometown welcome after 584 days in Hamas' clutches: ‘Their child is our child'
Alexander, wearing dark sunglasses and smiling from ear to ear, told The Post he was feeling 'great' and said it was good to be back as the SUV he rode in rolled down the tree-lined main drag.
People in the jubilant crowd held banners and signs reading 'Welcome home Edan,' and wrapped themselves in Israeli flags. Some jumped up and down and sang 'Am Yisrael Chai' — a Hebrew phrase translating to 'the people of Israel live.'
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6 Hundreds of friends, family and residents gathered downtown to watch the release of Edan Alexander, the last living U.S. citizen kidnapped by Hamas.
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6 Edan Alexander waving from a car window.
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The 21-year-old Israel Defense Forces staff sergeant was one of 251 Israelis taken captive by the terror group during the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks, and the last living American hostage to be released.
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'We didn't know if he was alive for a long time and that was very hard to think about,' Gaia Hamani, 25, of nearby Alpine, whose brother went to preschool and high school with Alexander, told The Post.
6 Crowds await the arrival of Edan Alexander in Tenafly, NJ on Thursday afternoon.
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6 Crowd of people waving as the police motorcade carrying Edan Alexander passes by.
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'He left everything. He left the comfort of his home in New Jersey. He didn't have to go to the army. He volunteered to do that. It takes a lot of courage and strength to do that.'
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After learning of his disappearance, Hamani said she and her mother put photos of Alexander in their wallets as a constant memento.
'We prayed for him all the time. I always think of him in relation to my brother — to think what he went through, I can't imagine,' she said.
6 Edan Alexander, 19 (pictured).
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Alexander was severely tortured and often locked in a cage during his captivity, and frequently shackled at the hands and feet, deep within the terrorists' underground tunnel network, according to the Kan public broadcaster.
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Alexander's freedom was achieved last month through Israel's military pressure in Gaza, as well as political pressure by President Trump.
6 People celebrate on the day Israeli-American hostage Edan Alexander, who was kidnapped during the October 7, 2023 attack, is released from captivity.
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Hamani said she burst into tears when she was driving to the homecoming celebration and saw kids waving Israeli flags.
Michal Fox, 51, of Englewood, a mother of four and a psychologist, said Alexander's safe return home was a bright, shining beacon of hope amid a long period of darkness for Jews both in Israel and the US.
'It's a great way for the community to come together. There are so many bad things that happened but we are going to celebrate him together,' she told The Post.
'It means to everyone that there is hope. There is resilience. He's the signature child, person for resilience and how we can get through things,' she added.
'I don't know them,' she said about Alexander's family, who were overjoyed at the news of his imminent release last month.
'I don't know anyone, but that's what the Jewish community does. We come together. Their child is our child.'
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- Boston Globe
Inside the 13-year search for Austin Tice, the journalist who disappeared
His escape that October was short-lived, according to U.S. and Syrian officials, as well as Tice's interrogator. Tice's captors put out an alert to security services across Damascus and swiftly recaptured him. From there, he would disappear into one of the world's most secretive and repressive regimes. Ever since, Tice's family and three American presidents have tried to find him, an agonizing endeavor where at times the only constant appeared to be the swirl of unconfirmed information and the obduracy of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Advertisement Despite intensive efforts to secure Tice's release or confirm his status, the truth about his fate remains elusive, making his case one of the most difficult U.S. officials say they have ever encountered. When the Assad regime crumbled in December 2024 after a whirlwind rebel advance, Tice's family saw an opening at last. But after the prisons opened, there was no sign of Tice, alive or dead. Advertisement To reconstruct the search for Tice, The Washington Post spoke with more than 70 people on four continents who knew him or worked on the long effort to rescue him, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter's sensitivity. Tice's family has been at the heart of the 13-year odyssey to find him, along with a rotating cast of diplomats, spies, investigators, religious figures, businessmen, journalists, activists and former hostages. This account, which includes previously unknown details and unreported secret contacts between U.S. and Syrian officials, reveals how the authorities in Damascus blocked years of efforts to find Tice. From the moment he went missing, the regime steadfastly denied that it knew anything about him, even as it orchestrated the filming of a video, released in September 2012, to make it appear as though Islamist militants had captured him. That video is the last visual proof of life they have, U.S. officials say. The Assad regime remained opaque and implacable until the end. As recently as 2023, a Syrian official received a message from Assad ahead of a meeting with U.S. officials, according to a person with knowledge of the event. The directive was simple: Do not talk about Austin Tice. The silence about Tice has been filled with a stream of uncorroborated information and unverified tips for more than a decade. Then, in April, the Syrian security official who had held Tice in the makeshift prison in Damascus walked into the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. His name was Bassam al-Hassan, a former member of Assad's inner circle, and the most senior regime official to claim knowledge of what happened. He had a shocking story to tell, saying that Tice was killed in 2013 on Assad's orders. But months have passed, and U.S. and Syrian officials say his account remains unsubstantiated. Advertisement Tice's parents, Debra, a stay-at-home mother, and Marc, a former energy executive, have persevered in their quest to bring their son home through changes in presidential administrations, a pandemic and the end of the Syrian civil war. They believe that their son is alive and that the U.S. government hasn't done enough to find him. 'There is only one way of measuring this,' Debra Tice said in an interview this month. 'If you didn't get him home, you've lost.' Part One: 'The greatest thing I've ever done' Damascus was so close, just four miles away. But for days, rebels had refused to take Tice into the capital, which was still in the grip of the Assad regime. Tice hated being stuck. He had this 'insane fantasy,' he told a friend, of arriving in Damascus in time to witness fighters storming the presidential palace. So he started walking. It was the summer of 2012. Like many foreign journalists covering the early years of Syria's devastating civil war, Tice had sneaked into the country from its border with Turkey to the north, relying on help from Syrians opposed to the regime. Unlike other journalists, he had ventured farther south toward Damascus than nearly anyone else had dared. Getting there meant moving between battle zones with local units of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), an assortment of largely Sunni rebel groups, while avoiding arrest, or worse, by the regime and steering clear of Islamist rebels. For Tice, documenting the war in Syria was both a moral imperative and a chance to reinvent himself, he told friends. Tice had served three combat tours as a Marine, including one in Afghanistan's Helmand province in 2011. He was attending Georgetown Law School but dreaded the idea of becoming a lawyer. His marriage had ended. Advertisement A self-described news junkie, Tice had dreamed of being a reporter ever since he was a child growing up in southwest Houston, where his mother home-schooled him and his six younger siblings. He devoured coverage of the Arab Spring, a wave of anti-authoritarian protests that convulsed the Middle East. In early 2012, friends said, he began laying the groundwork for a trip to Syria as a freelance photojournalist. Tice boarded a plane for Turkey in May after his spring semester at law school. 'This is either gonna be wildly successful or a complete disaster. Here goes nothing,' he wrote on Twitter. Equipped with a camera and a satellite phone, Tice began sending photos to McClatchy newspapers and Agence France-Presse. Before long he began writing stories, too. His first dispatch published by The Post, from the town of Khan Sheikhoun, appeared on June 19. It provided a vivid account of the guerrilla warfare tactics deployed by rebels against Assad's forces. After a pair of rebels crept toward a sniper post and launched two rocket-propelled grenades, the 'Syrian army responded with an ear-shattering barrage of directionless fire,' Tice wrote. Tice had years of military experience but was a newcomer to journalism. He peppered Mark Seibel, his editor at McClatchy, with questions about the trade. Early in his time in Syria, Tice wrote Seibel that he was debating the pros and cons of carrying a sidearm. Advertisement 'Would carrying a pistol be considered a significant breach of journalistic ethics, or do you think people would tend to understand, given the circumstances?' Tice asked. Seibel wrote back that he strongly advised against it. Tice replied he would follow that advice. In northern Syria, Tice met up with David Enders, another freelance journalist working for McClatchy, who spoke Arabic and had reported in Iraq. Enders urged Tice to return with him to Turkey at the end of June, but Tice demurred. He was determined to push south all the way to Damascus, Enders said. Tice and Enders would win a Polk award for their reporting on the war. Some rebels suspected Tice of being a spy, something his military training did little to dispel. He showed them how to fire weapons and once prevented an inexperienced fighter from being severely injured by the back blast from a shoulder-fired rocket-propelled grenade, Enders said. Seibel told Tice in a message that he had heard from Enders that some fighters thought he was with the FBI - but also that he was 'brave as sh*t.' By mid-July, Tice had arrived at al-Tal, several miles north of Damascus. After growing frustrated with the delays, he set out on foot for the capital. He made it about halfway there before being stopped by 'some overly helpful civilians' who called the FSA, Tice wrote in an email to his editors. The alarmed rebels retrieved Tice and confined him to a room for a couple of days for his own safety, Tice told a colleague and recounted in an email to his editors. At the end of July, the rebels finally took him to Damascus. Tice crossed the city from one rebel-held suburb to another, disguising himself as a woman in a veil and abaya to pass through government checkpoints, he wrote in a first-person account published by McClatchy. Advertisement At one point, he had to step out of a taxi and cross an intersection on foot. The abaya did little to conceal his 6-foot-3, 220-pound infantry officer frame. He was shot at and narrowly missed being captured. The risks Tice had taken made some colleagues blanch. His tale of crossing Damascus was 'astonishing, and not in a good way,' said a person who worked with him. 'It made me question his judgment.' Safwan Bahloul, a former three-star general who worked in Syria's external intelligence service, said he was tasked with finding out whether Tice was an American spy. Lorenzo Tugnoli/FTWP Tice, however, had enough of people telling him to be careful. In a Facebook post that month, he castigated Americans for 'losing the sense that there are actually things out there worth dying for.' Coming to Syria, he wrote, was 'the greatest thing I've ever done.' After he reached the southern Damascus suburb of Darayya, Tice began reporting what would have been his fourth story for The Post. He went to the nearby town of Jdeidat Artouz, which was then controlled by Jabhat al-Nusra, an Islamist rebel group allied with al-Qaeda at the time. The place was creepy, Tice said on Twitter, and he didn't feel safe there. By Aug. 10, he had returned to Darayya and began focusing on how to get to Beirut for a long-anticipated vacation after nearly three months in Syria. He submitted a 1,700-word story to The Post, he told Seibel, that would run in the coming days. The piece was about how Jabhat al-Nusra 'set in motion a shit storm that culminated in a government massacre,' Tice wrote in an email. The draft described a mass execution by government forces and allied militias, according to a copy reviewed by The Post. Saturday, Aug. 11, was Tice's 31st birthday. He and FSA rebels celebrated with a pool party at the farmhouse where they were staying. Taylor Swift was playing; there was whiskey on hand. 'Best birthday ever,' Tice wrote on Twitter. When Seibel didn't see a story in The Post by the following Wednesday, Aug. 15, he began to worry. The same day, Seibel recalled, he got a call from Marc Tice saying he hadn't heard from his son. Seibel emailed Douglas Jehl, The Post's then-foreign editor. By the following day, The Post had contacted the U.S. government, according to Seibel's notes. (Seibel was an editor at The Post from 2019 to 2024.) Tice's would-be fourth story for The Post was never published. Liz Sly, then a Beirut-based correspondent for The Post, recalls arguing at the time that running the piece could endanger Tice. 'Since the day Austin disappeared, The Washington Post has been unrelenting in its effort to find out what happened to him and to support his family,' a spokesperson for The Post said. 'Austin must come home.' Seibel later reviewed a record from Tice's satellite phone company that showed that the last time the device was active was at 11:37 coordinated universal time on Monday, Aug. 13, midafternoon in Syria. As friends and colleagues scrambled to re-create his movements, some witnesses told them they had seen Tice get into a taxi in Darayya. Tice's disappearance came at a tense moment in U.S.-Syria relations. The United States had already shuttered its embassy in Damascus. A week after Tice vanished, President Barack Obama said the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime would be a 'red line' for U.S. policy. By then, U.S. officials had begun working through the Czech Embassy, the representative for U.S. diplomatic interests in Syria, and other intermediaries, to find Tice. Two weeks after the disappearance, Eva Filipi, the Czech ambassador to Syria, told a television interviewer that according to information she had received, Tice was alive and had been 'detained by government forces on the outskirts of Damascus.' The next month, Seibel's phone rang at 4 a.m. in Washington. It was a woman in Canada, an amateur sleuth who had been scouring the internet for clues about Tice. She told Seibel that a video of him had just been posted on YouTube. In the shaky 46-second clip, a blindfolded Tice stumbles up a rocky slope, pushed by masked men carrying rifles and saying, 'Allahu akbar,' or 'God is great.' Tice stops, leans into one of his captors, and recites part of a Muslim prayer. Then Tice says, 'Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus.' Part Two: Captured by the regime When Tice left Darayya in August, he was hoping to cross into Lebanon and proceed to Beirut. His taxi driver, however, had other plans, according to two senior Syrian officials. The driver tipped off the authorities, an official said, and the vehicle was stopped at a checkpoint. The driver apparently kept Tice's laptop, the official said, adding that U.S. authorities later traced it to a restaurant in the greater Damascus area. Tice, like tens of thousands of Syrians, disappeared into the regime's vast detention apparatus, which included prisons run by official security forces as well as associated militias. He was handed over to Hassan, according to U.S. and current and former Syrian officials. Safwan Bahloul, a former three-star general who worked in Syria's external intelligence service, said in an interview at his home in Syria that Hassan had tasked him with interrogating Tice and gave him the American's iPhone. Bahloul, who went by the code name 'Abu Zeid,' said his job was to find out whether Tice was 'merely a journalist' or an American spy. U.S. officials have not corroborated Bahloul's account. Tice was held in a makeshift prison down the street from Hassan's office, Bahloul said. The premises also served as a parking lot for pickup trucks mounted with medium-caliber machine guns. Bahloul, who speaks fluent English and has spent time in Britain and the U.S., said he brought Tice a sandwich from a well-known shop and insisted his handcuffs be removed by the guards during their interrogation sessions. The neighborhood where Tice had fled, al-Mazzeh, was home to top regime officials and Tice was swiftly recaptured. Lorenzo Tugnoli/FTWP At one point, Bahloul said, he saw officers working with Hassan getting ready to film what he characterized as a farce to 'camouflage where [Tice] was arrested and by whom.' Mohammed Makhlouf, an associate of Hassan's, provided the clothing and weapons for the video, Bahloul said, to make security personnel look like militants. The effort failed: Fellow journalists covering Syria immediately found the YouTube video suspicious, a clumsy attempt to pin Tice's abduction on Islamist militants or rebel forces. The U.S. government agreed. An intelligence analysis of the video indicated that it was shot near a regime facility, a former Trump administration official said. Tice's daring escape came after the video was released, U.S. officials believe. In late October 2012, his captors issued a bulletin that circulated internally among security agencies saying Tice was at large. It bore his picture. Two Syrian officials also confirmed that Tice had managed to break out of detention. Then came a stroke of bad luck: Seeking help, Tice knocked on the wrong door, the officials said. Unbeknownst to him, the neighborhood where he had fled was home to top regime officials, including Assad's intelligence chief, Ali Mamlouk, a senior Syrian official said. Tice was swiftly recaptured. Despite denials in Damascus, U.S. officials felt confident that Syrian authorities held Tice. That conviction deepened in November, when someone accessed Tice's Facebook account using the correct password. The log-on was traced by U.S. investigators to a Damascus block that also housed a Syrian military intelligence office, according to a former U.S. official and another person familiar with the matter. Meanwhile, from the first days of Tice's disappearance, there had been strenuous efforts by his family, the U.S. government, McClatchy and The Post to try to secure his release, often working through intermediaries because of the isolation of the Syrian regime. 'We thought it was going to be days at most, then weeks at most,' said Griff Witte, a former editor at The Post. 'No one goes into these things thinking it's going to be 13 years.' 'Hope,' Witte said he had learned, 'can be a dangerous thing.' One moment of raised hopes came in early 2013, when an unofficial back-channel effort to release Tice appeared close to fruition. Witte asked Ryan Crocker, a former U.S. ambassador to Syria, to reach out to Faisal Mekdad, then the country's deputy foreign minister. Crocker agreed to try. The two men spoke on the phone on March 17, Crocker said in an interview. Mekdad said that 'he has instructions from 'the highest levels' to do everything possible,' Crocker recounted in an email to Witte and a senior State Department official. But Mekdad repeated that 'the government knows nothing about the case' and added that 'the important thing is Austin's safety and that nothing be done to jeopardize it.' Mekdad, communicating recently through a family member, emphasized that the Syrian Foreign Ministry in that period relied on the country's security agencies for information on Tice, and their 'consistent response was that these agencies had no information about his whereabouts.' Four days later, Crocker received an email from Witte, who was coordinating The Post's efforts to find Tice. 'The Syrians now say the release will be next week,' Witte wrote. 'No exact date.' Witte was not directly in touch with Syrian officials and was working through a contact at the Liechtenstein Foundation for State Governance, an organization that offers mediation among countries in conflict. Then came delays and excuses, relayed via the foundation's intermediaries. Tice had a fever and needed rest and medical treatment; after he recovered, there would be a lengthy interrogation. Only then would he be released, according to an email Crocker received from Witte. The days and months stretched on without Tice being released. 'We were very hopeful,' Marc Tice recalled. But as time went by, they came to understand that it was 'misplaced hope,' he said. Tice's abduction came at a time when kidnappings of American and European reporters and aid workers were on the rise. In 2014, three Americans held by the Islamic State - including journalist James Foley - were beheaded, their executions videotaped. The perceived failures in how those cases were handled led Obama to launch a policy review, which culminated in an overhaul of the government's approach to hostage situations. Meanwhile, for the Tice family, it was the beginning of what would become more than a decade of desperate advocacy in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East. 'Our government has not been a good advocate for Austin,' Debra Tice said. Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post In 2014, Debra Tice traveled to Damascus, where she stayed at a small hotel in the center of the city. She handed out fliers about her son and tried to meet with the authorities, largely without success. Sometimes she went to the Czech Embassy to see Filipi, the ambassador. The two women would have lunch and pray together. As the weeks went on, Filipi said, people began approaching Debra Tice with tips about her son and asking for money in exchange. 'They were saying, 'He was in Aleppo, he was in Homs,'' Filipi recalled. She told Debra Tice the information was worthless. 'I said to Debi, it's time to leave.' Filipi continued to press. She met with Assad at least twice, she said in an interview, raising the fate of Tice and several other Americans, dual citizens whose cases have largely not been made public. Assad's response was courteous but noncommittal, Filipi said: He asked where to convey any information he might gather. Debra Tice would return to Damascus in 2015, part of her unrelenting search to find her son. A devout Catholic, she had raised seven children. 'I make amazing chicken soup, and no matter what happens in those baby's diapers, I can make them absolutely white again,' she said. 'That's who I am.' But her son's disappearance also turned her into someone else. Someone who knew the intricacies of the Syrian regime as well as any expert, someone who pounded on any door if she thought it could help. 'My mom, really she should have been a reporter,' Austin Tice wrote in an email to an editor in July 2012. 'Or a detective.' Part Three: A refusal to engage The U.S. government's search for Tice now stretches across four administrations. Three presidents - Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden - have tried to bring him home. Efforts have included meetings between CIA officers and Syrian intelligence officials in Oman and Damascus, previously unreported contacts that occurred even as the CIA was covertly training and equipping Syrian rebels. They also involved attempts to influence Assad and people close to him by offering incentives such as access to advanced medical equipment affected by sanctions. U.S. officials say they repeatedly offered the Assad regime what they believed was a face-saving off-ramp: free Tice and no more questions asked. If Assad wanted to stick to the story suggested by the 2012 video, namely that Tice had been held by Islamist militants, the U.S. would publicly accept it, diplomats said. In 2015 and 2016, according to two former U.S. intelligence officials, a senior CIA officer traveled to Muscat, the Omani capital, for meetings with Mohammed Dib Zaitoun, then the second-highest-ranking civilian intelligence official in Syria. The officer and his team met with the Syrian official in a government compound near the beach and drank tea in a private room with silk carpets on the floor. The Americans conveyed their concerns about Tice and the anguish of his family. The Syrians didn't want to discuss Tice. When the Americans pressed, the Syrians were adamant: They had no knowledge of Tice's whereabouts. In the end, one of the former intelligence officials said, 'it amounted to a hill of beans.' In 2016, James C. O'Brien, a career diplomat appointed by Obama to the new role of special envoy for hostage affairs, met twice with a senior Syrian intelligence official in a third country. O'Brien said he signaled that the U.S. was ready for the possibility that Tice had died. 'I was very clear that I wanted his safe return, but if there was a different story to be told, it was time to tell it,' O'Brien recalled. 'They had a number of ways to let it be known that he was not alive, and they chose not to take those.' In the fall of 2017, another senior CIA officer traveled to Damascus, the first visit to the Syrian capital by an American official since the U.S. had shuttered its embassy there in early 2012, according to four former U.S. officials. The officer flew from Oman to Beirut, then rode the 70 miles to Damascus in an armored SUV, where he met with Zaitoun, the senior civilian intelligence official, to discuss issues such as sanctions and counterterrorism. But he also raised Tice as a subject of concern to the U.S., according to the former officials. He took back to his superiors in Washington a list of items of interest to Damascus, but for reasons that are unclear, the Trump administration did not pursue the opening, said two former officials. During Trump's first term as president, he showed a keen interest in the plight of American hostages. In 2018, Robert O'Brien became the special envoy for hostage affairs and met early on with the Tice family in a room at the State Department. Debra Tice asked to start with a prayer. O'Brien, who is Mormon, agreed. They all bowed their heads. O'Brien used back channels to communicate with the Syrian regime. In late 2018, the Vatican arranged a dinner in Rome for O'Brien with prominent businesspeople, priests and cardinals. Among them was Suleiman Antoine Frangieh, a Christian politician in Lebanon who had grown up with Assad. At O'Brien's request, Frangieh reached out to Assad, but the Syrian president responded that he did not know where Tice was. Assad added that 'if the Americans want assistance in searching for him, they should make the request openly and not in secret,' Frangieh recalled in a statement to The Post. That same year, CIA Director Gina Haspel created a cell dedicated to determining Tice's status, according to several people familiar with the matter. The team consisted of eight to 10 people - a significant commitment of resources to an intelligence puzzle 'with only cold leads,' recalled one former official. Meanwhile, Debra Tice continued to challenge U.S. officials. If she had gone to Damascus, why couldn't they? In late 2019, two senior White House counterterrorism officials, Christopher Miller and Kash Patel, tried, but once they landed in Beirut, the trip was scuttled because of clashes in Lebanon. By 2020, O'Brien had been elevated to Trump's national security adviser and the moment appeared ripe for a new attempt at high-level diplomacy. U.S. officials believed they had several carrots to offer the Syrians, O'Brien said in an interview. First, Trump was considering withdrawing some troops from Syria. Second, the U.S. was prepared to explore ways to assist Assad's British-born wife, Asma, who was suffering from cancer, by facilitating access to medical equipment that might be difficult to import because of sanctions. Meanwhile, some Persian Gulf Arab countries were starting to restore relations with Damascus. The U.S. asked those countries to make the reopening of their embassies in Syria contingent on Tice's return. In August 2020, U.S. officials made another push on Damascus. Patel and Roger Carstens, a former Special Forces officer who a few months before had been appointed envoy for hostage affairs, flew to Beirut in a second attempt to reach the Syrian capital. They were greeted by Abbas Ibrahim, Lebanon's intelligence chief. The following morning, they rode in Ibrahim's armored BMW, accompanied by several security vehicles, in a convoy to Damascus. There they met with Mamlouk, Assad's national intelligence chief and one of his closest advisers, for roughly two hours at Mamlouk's office on the outskirts of the city. At one point, Carstens said in an interview, Mamlouk made clear that the regime had three priorities: withdrawal of U.S. troops, lifting of sanctions and reestablishment of diplomatic relations. That gave Carstens an opening. He explained that those were significant requests that could take time and might involve seeking approval from Congress. But there might be a way to speed things up. Mamlouk was intrigued: How? By providing information about Tice and several other Americans believed to be held by the regime, Carstens said. They included Majd Kamalmaz, a psychotherapist who traveled to Syria in 2017 and was later confirmed killed. Carstens and Patel asked Mamlouk for proof that Tice was still alive. The Syrians stonewalled, saying their own demands would need to be met first. Carstens and Patel returned to Washington empty-handed. The FBI, which Patel now leads, declined to comment about the meeting. The following month, Trump called into 'Fox & Friends.' Early in his term, Trump said, he had wanted to assassinate Assad, but Defense Secretary Jim Mattis opposed the step. 'I would have rather taken him out, I had him all set,' Trump said on the show. Assad considered the comments an insult, Ibrahim said, and with Trump focused on his reelection campaign, further talks would have to wait for outreach by a new administration. In May 2022, Biden met with Debra and Marc Tice at the White House, two days after their son's plight was highlighted at a White House Correspondents' Association dinner where Biden was in attendance. During the meeting in the Oval Office, Biden told the Tices that the administration would do everything it could, including making a push for direct meetings with the Syrians, recalled a former U.S. official familiar with the meeting. But Biden was also careful to add that the family had to be prepared for the possibility that Tice might ''no longer be with us,' the former official recalled. By then, the U.S. government, led by the FBI, had interviewed witnesses, pursued leads, surged intelligence efforts and pressed for direct talks, but had not been able, officials say, to obtain confirmed evidence of Tice's status. That gap made Tice's case different from those of dozens of Americans whom the U.S. had successfully freed around the world. In February 2023, two senior Biden officials, Joshua Geltzer and Brett McGurk, traveled to Oman for talks with the Syrians. They made clear in advance that the goal was to find out what had happened to Tice, having set the agenda with the sultan of Oman, who brokered the talks, according to two former U.S. officials familiar with the matter. On the other side of the table was Imad Moustapha, an urbane veteran diplomat who was formerly Syria's ambassador to the U.S. and China, and three other Syrian officials. Before the meeting in Muscat, Moustapha had met with Assad, a former Syrian official said. The president was categorical about the message to be conveyed: We don't know where Tice is and don't have him. During the meeting, Geltzer pushed a copy of a document across the table, according to the former U.S. officials. It was the 'Wanted' bulletin issued by the government when Tice escaped from detention in late October 2012. Moustapha, genial but disciplined, made clear he did not have a mandate to engage. 'It was like pushing a wet noodle across the table,' said one of the former officials. There was one small opening. The Syrians were interested in visiting oil and gas fields in rebel-held areas. Geltzer and McGurk agreed to raise the idea with Washington and report back in exchange for the Syrians helping with information about Tice's status. Assad, meanwhile, was furious that Moustapha had even discussed Tice, the former Syrian official said. 'Who gave you the mandate to discuss anything?'' Assad asked, according to the official. Deep down, the former Syrian official suspected there was a simple reason for Assad's obstinacy: He knew what had happened to Tice. 'This is why he is categorically refusing to engage,' the official said. The teams returned to Oman three months later. The Americans offered to facilitate access to the energy facilities but met a brick wall about Tice. The meeting ended quickly. Inside the U.S. government, the agencies trying to find Tice could reach no definitive conclusion on his fate. Since at least 2016, the intelligence community had assessed that Tice was alive, although with low confidence. However, after Assad was toppled in late 2024 and weeks went by with no breakthroughs - despite the government offering a $10 million reward for information - the CIA changed its assessment, saying Tice was probably dead, but again, with low confidence. None of the alleged sightings of Tice after the 2012 video were ever verified by U.S. officials. Neither, however, were the reports of his death. As recently as last year, the leader of a Syrian rebel group approached Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a Washington-based advocacy group, to tell him that he had found the spot in Damascus where Tice was buried. The rebel leader smuggled a decaying foot from the grave to the Tanf U.S. military base in Syria, Moustafa and another person familiar with the matter said. The FBI tested the sample. It wasn't Tice. Part Four: A shocking account The interrogation took place over several days in April in Beirut. Hassan, the Syrian official who had held Tice not long after his capture, spoke with CIA officers and FBI agents, who questioned him about the Assad regime, its ties to Iran and Tice's fate. Hassan said that Assad ordered him to have Tice killed in 2013 and that he tried to dissuade Assad, according to U.S. officials and another person familiar with the matter. Hassan said he had Tice killed by a subordinate, the U.S. officials and other people familiar with the interview said. Attempts to reach Hassan by phone, email and through a close relative were unsuccessful. The Post reached the subordinate, an officer who reported to Hassan and left Syria after the fall of the Assad regime. He agreed to speak on the condition that this name and whereabouts not be published. 'I have never met Austin Tice, and I did not kill Austin Tice,' he said. U.S. officials have not corroborated Hassan's story. Their counterparts in the new Syrian government don't believe his account. A senior Syrian security official noted that Hassan went to Iran after the Assad regime fell and that the Iranian government facilitated his travel to Lebanon, raising the prospect that his story could be disinformation. Hassan described to U.S. officials a place where Tice's remains could be found. But months later, the location remains unsearched by U.S. or Syrian officials. The Tices say U.S. officials told them they needed time to determine the equipment necessary to properly excavate it. Privately , U.S. officials also cite security concerns. The Syrian security official said there had been delays in coordinating a visit to the site. The FBI declined to comment, saying the investigation 'remains ongoing.' Some of those involved in the search for Tice say it is possible there will never be definitive proof of his fate. They likened it to the quest to find Robert Levinson, a retired FBI agent who vanished in Iran in 2007. It was not until 13 years later that the U.S. government concluded Levinson was dead. His family is still seeking his remains. Trump, for his part, has sounded a cautionary tone. 'There's been virtually no sign … of Austin,' he said in late March. 'It's been a long time. It's been many, many years. … So, you know, a lot of bad things happen, but we will never - until we find out something definitive one way or the other - we will never stop looking for him.'' Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said this week that while the Trump administration has 'no new details to share, our search for Austin will not end until his case is resolved.' The new Syrian government, led by former militant Ahmed al-Sharaa - formerly known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani - is cooperating with U.S. efforts to locate Tice. A senior Syrian security official said investigators are pursuing a new lead based on recent interviews with two of Hassan's associates. His former office manager and a close friend told them that in 2013 Tice was taken from Hassan's compound by a high-level operative of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia allied with Assad and Iran. Then the trail goes cold, the official said. The U.S. government has no corroboration of that account. In April, the Trump administration allowed Debra and Marc Tice to review declassified secret intelligence collected in the search for their son, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, in an email to The Post, called it a 'special and unprecedented briefing' and said the records were not cleared for public release. But for the Tices, access to the information only deepened their disillusionment with U.S. efforts. 'It's been a charade,' Debra Tice said. 'Our government has not been a good advocate for Austin.' Earlier this year, Debra Tice returned to Damascus, where she met for more than an hour with Sharaa in a formal reception room. Sharaa, whom she had met before, once told her a story. Back when he was a young militant imprisoned in Iraq, he was reported dead. His mother refused to believe it. Even when others questioned her mental state, Sharaa's mother bought clothes for her son and insisted he was alive. 'That's very, very inspirational to me,' Debra Tice said. 'My son's not dead. He's walking around somewhere.' Nakashima and Schaffer reported from Washington, and Slater from Williamstown, Massachusetts. Karen DeYoung in Washington, Mohamad El Chamaa and Suzan Haidamous in Beirut, and Fakhr Al Ayoubi in Syria contributed to this report.
Fox News
an hour ago
- Fox News
SCOOP: Trump's newest DC crime crackdown yields more than 100 arrests
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CNN
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- CNN
CNN contributor sounds off on the big issue of sex toys thrown at WNBA games
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