State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said on Tuesday that the United States has asked the main Syrian rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) to help find and release American journalist Austin Tice.
Theiss, a freelance journalist, is believed to have been captured near Damascus on August 14, 2012 while covering the country’s civil war.
He was last seen blindfolded and in obvious distress in a video posted online weeks after his capture. The US believes he was held by the Assad regime.
President Joe Biden said the US believed Mr Tice was alivebut they must pinpoint its location.
Syria’s new leadership said on Thursday that the search for Mr Tais was “ongoing” and that it was ready to “cooperate directly” with the US to find Americans who have disappeared under the Assad regime.
Now the regime has collapsed was notorious for its extremely brutal prisons, where the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group estimates that nearly 60,000 people have been tortured and killed.
Across Syria this week, families desperate to find loved ones are flocking to these dark prisons.
The Syrian Civil Defense, known as the White Helmets, assisted in the search, including in the notorious Saydnaya prison complex. human rights groups called it a “human slaughterhouse”.
“We are looking for secret prisons in several districts of Damascus,” Raed Saleh, director of the White Helmets, told the BBC.
“We can’t say too much about it, but we’re looking.”
The White Helmets, known for pulling survivors from the rubble of Syria’s devastating civil war, say they have helped free thousands of detainees from prisons.
But many families are still searching in vain.
“What happened in Saidnaya is very painful for the families who were waiting for their loved ones,” Saleh admitted.
“Our inability to contact anyone else in Saidna since the initial release of the prisoners means that those people who were there are either dead or elsewhere.
“We have at least two teams looking for prisoners.
“One team with police dogs is searching for survivors. Another team specializes in picking locks and breaking into cells.’
