Around the same time, I was talking to a Spanish freelance journalist, Ricardo Garcia Vilanova, who’d spent a few days with Foley and Tice in the suburbs of Homs and had been arrested by Islamic militants before, when he surprised me with the news that he was shortly heading back inside. Two weeks later he was again in the custody of the same group; at the time of this writing, he still is.

The Business of Kidnapping

This is how it goes. Blindfolded, with your hands tied behind your back, you’re manhandled into the backseat of a car. With your head forced down into the brace position, a burly shabiha on each side, you can’t see a thing. But hearing is enough. What you can hear is the screeching of the vehicle and the thumping militaristic pop music as your captors sing along to “God, Syria and Bashar” on the radio. After what seems like hours, you’re pushed out of the car at a military airport. You can hear the whir of helicopter blades. A few hours later you’re in Damascus and being driven at full throttle to a security compound, where you’re deposited in your own tiny concrete cell deep underground.

That’s if you’ve been kidnapped by the regime. I’ve spoken to over a dozen journalists who have been arrested or kidnapped in Syria and later released either because a ransom was paid or for some inexplicable reason of the captors’. The description above was furnished by a European who, several weeks before Jim Foley went missing, was given safe passage into the pro-regime village of Fua by a gang of shabiha before being betrayed into the hands of another gang of shabiha, and thus falling into the custody of the Syrian authorities. (In return for his release his employer undertook not to speak about the case and must remain unnamed.) A month later, in December 2012, the NBC correspondent Richard Engel had just crossed the Turkish border into Syria when he was held captive for five days by suspected pro-regime paramilitaries. Around the same time, a German freelance journalist named Billy Six was driving through the countryside of northern Syria when he was taken at a checkpoint by the Syrian Army. The Syrian regime, according to Billy Six, claimed to know nothing of his detention until, thanks to a random encounter with another prisoner, his government got definitive wind of where he was, and eventually won his release.

Austin Tice had told Mahmoud that he wanted to be the first American journalist to get all the way from rebel areas in the north to Damascus. Mahmoud replied, “Dead or alive?” If Tice is alive, he is likely being held in the capital itself and he likely has the company of other foreigners—even if he doesn’t know they’re there. For the first two weeks of his detention, the European journalist arrested in Fua was held in what he now takes to be a “foreigners’ complex” in Damascus—a prison within a prison—specially designed to hold prisoners like him. The Syrians I have spoken with agree. Foreign captives are very valuable to the regime, said one veteran of Damascus political prisons, and are always held separately. They might even function as an internal currency within the Syrian security state. “There are a vast array of different intelligence agencies all jockeying for position,” said the European journalist kidnapped in Fua. “They can use high-profile prisoners as leverage among themselves, as well as for their dealings with the outside world.”

I traveled to Damascus on a rare journalist’s visa in September 2013. Army or shabiha checkpoints had been thrown up on almost every corner; men with leather jackets and gray, regulation Ba’thist beards hung around at intersections, Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders. In the center of the city I came to Umawiyeen Square, with its stunning view of Mount Qasioun. Most journalists stay in this area when they’re in town, in a clutch of luxury hotels dotted around the square. Ironically, if Austin Tice is in the custody of the Syrian government, he’s probably in this neighborhood, too. Within a short walk of the square you will find the headquarters buildings of the various components of Syria’s security state, plus the headquarters of the army and air force. The whole area is laced with security compounds. Almost all contain prisons, most of them deep underground. At some of the side entrances are the beginnings of underground carriageways; on nearby mounds of grass, men pop up from camouflaged manholes and keep walking.