‘They got rid of anything to show they had my father’

Bel Trew joins those searching Damascus and sites across Syria for journalist Austin Tice and other US citizens who went missing under the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad

- Bel Trew

Makeshift blindfolds, rusted manacles, and messages of despair scratched into the walls of solitary confinement cells by inmates using olive stones. These are the signs of “life” left in the haunted corridors of the prison in the Republican Guard Compound in Damascus: a notorious and previously closed-off location in the Syrian capital.

Clinging to a hill overlooking the city, the sprawling complex and prison is, according to US diplomats and intelligence officials, one of the most likely locations where the regime of Bashar al-Assad detained Austin Tice, the longest-held American journalist in history. The former US Marine was abducted in government-controlled areas while reporting on Syria’s civil war in 2012 and is among a “handful” of Americans who remain missing, including psychotherapist Majd Kamalmaz, who vanished in 2017.

The US believes Tice was still alive right up until the overthrow of Assad, whose administration spent decades forcibly disappearing, torturing and murdering people. In many cases, the evidence was destroyed – with US officials saying that included the use of dissolving vats of acid and cremating remains. And so, every site that Tice and others may be or have been must be searched thoroughly and quickly.

An FBI forensic team has visited the guard compound to scout for clues, including documenting English phrases scratched into the walls, says special presidential envoy for hostage affairs Roger Carstens, who personally joined the search on a recent trip to Damascus that he called “thorough but not exhaustive”.

“More work needs to be done on that specific site [the Republican Guard Compound] alone. There are many more sites in different physical locations that must be investigated,” he says back at his office in Washington DC, holding a map of at least 11 locations that require a proper search.