Syrian regime planned American journalist's kidnapping for weeks

Russell Gossett American journalist Austin Tice, who disappeared in Syria in 2012, was kidnapped in a calculated operation that was undertaken over several weeks, according to new reporting from the BBC and NPR.

A member of the group that detained Tice has also claimed the abduction was sanctioned by Syria's leader at the time, President Bashar al-Assad.

Tice was last seen outside of captivity in August of 2012, by rebel fighters, getting into a car with a driver he knew and trusted. For years, many assumed the car had simply stumbled upon a government checkpoint, and that the abduction of the journalist was opportunistic.

New evidence uncovered by reporters Joshua Baker and Sara Obeidat, and included in the podcast series Where is Austin Tice?, from BBC Radio 4 and NPR's Embedded, shows Tice's disappearance was anything but chance.

Baker and Obeidat spoke to members of the Assad regime about Tice's detention, and reviewed recordings of a discussion about his abduction involving a senior regime officer.

One of the people they spoke to, a man named Abu Ali who served in the National Defense Force (NDF), a militia loyal to Assad, said the operation to abduct the journalist began with Tice's driver — a man Tice appeared to have trusted but who had been passing information to the regime. According to Ali, the driver told senior NDF member Sakr Rustom that an American journalist was moving through rebel-held areas and reporting on the opposition.

Tice had pushed into areas of Syria that few journalists had gone to and his reporting was published on the front page of the Washington Post . The Assad regime, meanwhile, was cracking down on anyone revealing its human rights abuses.

Rustom was not just any NDF militia contact — he was the nephew of Bassam al-Hassan, head of the NDF and one of Assad's most trusted security figures. Hassan was also a major general in the Republican Guard.

According to Ali, the information on Tice was passed up to Hassan, who, in turn, shared it with Assad.

Ali says he was subsequently called into Hassan's office and told the president had approved the operation.

Tice, a student at Georgetown Law who earlier had served as a captain in the U.S. Marines, traveled to Syria in 2012 to become a freelance war reporter.

When Assad's government fell a dozen years later, Tice's friends and family hoped he would emerge from the regime's prisons.

Where is Austin Tice? tells the story of a multi-year investigation by Baker and Obeidat into the disappearance of the American freelance reporter. His case has been followed closely by international media and cited by successive U.S. presidents.

Shortly after the Assad government collapsed in 2024, the BBC uncovered secret Syrian intelligence files on Tice — hundreds of pages of internal records that provided definitive proof the regime once held the journalist.