Since freelance journalist Austin Tice vanished in Syria in 2012 Marc and Debra Tice’s world has been turned upside down but they have not wavered in their fight to bring him home

One month ago, Debra and Marc Tice flew to New York to tell the story of their son’s disappearance. In a conference room at the United Nations headquarters, in front of a dozen journalists, they projected his photograph on to a screen. It showed a young man standing on the crest of a mountain, smiling and unshaven, with a pair of sporty sunglasses crowning his messy brown hair.

“Please allow us to introduce our son Austin Tice,” Debra Tice said into a microphone.

More than six years have passed since the Tices last saw him.

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In May of 2012, after graduating from Georgetown’s foreign service school and serving in the US Marine Corps, Austin set out for Syria, where he rapidly established himself as a freelance conflict reporter. His photographs and stories – for McClatchy and the Washington Post, among other outlets – described the human costs of an escalating civil war. But in August, just days after his 31st birthday, Tice’s communications abruptly stopped. To this day, his fate remains unknown.

“Six years, one month and four days ago, he was detained at a checkpoint near Damascus,” Debra Tice said, reading her statement from a rumpled piece of paper that looked as though it had been reread many times. Gently, Marc Tice placed his hand on his wife’s back. More than once, during emotional moments, the two of them locked eyes.

The Tices are unable to share details from their recent conversations with the US and Syrian governments. But both governments have expressed a commitment to finding him, and in September, 24 members of Congress urged Donald Trump and his advisers to continue the search. Earlier this year, a state department spokesperson said that the US believes Austin Tice has survived detention in Syria. The FBI offered a $1m reward for information leading to his safe return. “We have every reason to believe Austin is alive and yearning to walk free,” his mother said. “Bring our son home.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Debra and Marc Tice at a press conference hosted by the United Nations Correspondents Association. Photograph: Ali Smith/Photograph by Ali Smith

The next day, I met the Tices at an Italian restaurant, on their way to meetings in Washington DC. They brought their luggage with them and were neatly dressed, wearing #FreeAustinTice pins. Before Austin disappeared, Debra told me, she kept a thick planner filled with miscellaneous family appointments. Nowadays, leads in Austin’s case take precedence over all else. “You just do it as it comes up,” she told me. “You just do the next thing.”

Over the years, the Tices have told Austin’s story hundreds, if not thousands, of times. Their son’s disappearance has taken them across the world, and has utterly transformed their lives as parents. They have asked for help from high-ranking bureaucrats, diplomats, reporters and complete strangers. “These are things that shock me when I say them, because I am a stay-at-home mom,” Debra said. “I still don’t own it as my new identity.”

Unlike some families of Americans detained abroad, they believe that the higher their son’s profile, the sooner he will come home. In a way, their far-reaching efforts to spread the word, and to investigate their son’s whereabouts, have come to resemble Austin’s own work as a journalist.

Austin Tice grew up in Houston, Texas, where his mother home-schooled him until he was a teenager. Even as a boy, he had a bold streak. Once, when Austin was a toddler, his uncle offered to pay him a dollar if he would drink a bowl of hot sauce. “He downed the hot sauce,” his father recalled. When Austin was five or six, he began keeping daily journals, which still sit in the attic, his mother said. She has never read them. “He would record stories that he made up on a tape recorder,” she told me. As a kid, he submitted a story to a nature magazine, about a bird’s nest he spotted on top of a stop sign. To his delight, it was accepted.

In recent years, as Austin Tice has become widely known as a detained journalist, his parents have looked for other, more personal ways to describe him. “You’ll hear him when he’s a couple of blocks away. He is the loudest person in the city,” his mother told me, before attempting an impression. “He’s probably going to say, ‘Dude!’” Around 2000, before heading to Georgetown for college, Austin went backpacking through Europe. When he went missing, many years later, the Tices heard from people who had met him during that trip.

In 2005, after a semester at Georgetown, Tice joined the Marine Corps as a commissioned officer, at the rank of second lieutenant. He deployed twice before returning to Georgetown. But the military had changed him, deepening his seriousness and pushing him to think about his role in the world. In 2011, impatient with school, he volunteered for third tour as a reservist. During that deployment, he started to think of himself as a reporter. Stationed in the desert in southern Afghanistan, he bought an audio recorder and a Nikon camera.

He also created a Twitter account, and his posts spoke candidly about his doubts and dreams. Just before his 30th birthday, he questioned the very war that he was engaged in: “Supporting troops on an individual level does not absolve a citizen of the moral duty to shape policy in a Republic. End this war.” He was writing essays about Afghanistan and reading news of the Arab spring. “Right now I wish I were in #Libya so bad,” he tweeted in August 2011. A few months later, he wrote, “Yesterday one of our Marines hit an IED; lost his left leg and right calf. I saw him on his way to the medevac. He was lucid and brave.”

In 2012, Austin returned to law school once more. He stuck around for the spring semester, but this time, he spent his spare moments contacting journalists and asking about their craft. He took photographs outside the Syrian embassy in Washington, where demonstrators were protesting against a government-led massacre in Homs.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Austin Tice in Cairo in March 2012. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

In May 2012, he flew to Turkey, intending to spend his summer in Syria. “This is either gonna be wildly successful or a complete disaster. Here goes nothing,” he wrote on Twitter. Then, a few days later: “Crossed into Syria. My guide kissed the ground. ‘Praise God. This is the first time I have been in my country in twenty four years.’” He was following the Free Syrian Army, a rebel group fighting Russia-backed government forces.

He honed his skills as a war reporter with astonishing speed. Although he was drawn to the cause of the Free Syrian Army, his stories scrutinized both sides. One month after his arrival in Syria, for the Washington Post, he asked a rebel named Shahm about bruises on the face of a suspected government spy.

“Shahm responded with difficulty to questions about the prisoner’s treatment. We are not killers. We are not like Assad,” he said. “But this man, he used to be one of us. And he was responsible for the deaths of more than 10 men. Our friends. Sometimes in war, you must set your principles and your education aside.”

“He sounded like a man trying to convince himself,” Tice went on. As a veteran, he may have identified with that observation. His reporting often channeled his years in the military, charting rebel tactics and weapons movements alongside human experiences. Some fellow journalists advised him to take fewer risks in where he traveled, and what he shared online. But on Facebook, he wrote that he wanted to channel the bravery and “pioneering spirit” of his American heroes.

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On the morning of 11 August 2012, after a harrowing journey through the war-torn city of Damascus, Tice turned 31. “Listening to the shells usher in my birthday,” he wrote on Twitter. “What an insane year.” Later that day, he celebrated at a pool party, listening to Taylor Swift with the soldiers he was following. “They even brought me whiskey,” he tweeted. “Hands down, best birthday ever.”

That was his last tweet. Within days, his email account and phone had fallen silent. Austin Tice had gone dark.

For the Tices, Austin’s disappearance ushered in a years-long, round-the-clock effort to find their son. They spoke to his editors and learned that he had taken a taxi bound for Lebanon, leaving from the Damascus suburb of Daraya. The US government suggested that he was in the custody of the Syrian government, a suspicion that remains unconfirmed. Then, in September 2012, a shocking video appeared online, showing Austin bound and blindfolded in the custody of unidentified gunmen. As the story spread, the Tices began receiving tips from all around the world.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A pin distributed by Debra and Marc Tice, parents of Austin Tice. They say they have credible evidence he is alive and work tirelessly for his return home. Photograph: Ali Smith/The Guardian

Delphine Halgand, the former North America director of Reporters Without Borders, met the Tices shortly after Austin disappeared. “The first time I met them, they thought their son would be back in a few weeks,” she told me. But as the months wore on, they did not lose faith, she told me. “It’s so hard, physically and emotionally, to stay so active for so long,” Halgand said. “It’s pretty unique to meet people who are so strongly believing.” Debra Tice often uses the phrase, “Praise be to God.”

Halgand remembers receiving emails from James Foley, another freelance reporter covering the Syrian civil war. “Jim looked for him in Syria,” Halgand told me. “He was dedicated to find out what happened.” Three months after Austin’s disappearance, Foley was kidnapped by Isis. In 2014, he was murdered.

Over the years, the Tices have met with countless government officials, non-governmental organizations and journalists. “They became experts of international relations and politics,” Halgand told me. With the Foley family, the Tices advocated successfully for new government policies in hostage situations, as well as news industry standards that better protect freelance reporters.

They have also retraced parts of Austin’s journey. They traveled together to Beirut, and Debra went on to Damascus, a city that still bears the scars of Syria’s brutal civil war. Strangely, they felt a kinship with the Middle East. It’s a region that Austin connected with, and a place where locals relate to stories of missing family members. Debra said, “Nobody’s jaw drops. It doesn’t blow anyone away.” Marc said he heard stories in Beirut that made him think, “Our road’s not nearly as hard as that.”

After the Tices made their statement at the UN, a journalist pointed out that Syria and the United States had renewed diplomatic contact. He asked whether that gave the family a reason to be hopeful. He seemed to be asking, as reporters often do, whether they expected developments in the story. Debra caught her husband’s eye and smiled wearily. “We can find a reason every single day,” she said. When asked for details about who was holding their son, and where – a question that her statement had already addressed – her response seemed resigned. “We can’t tell you,” she said.

It can feel painful merely to plan ahead, the Tices told me. Accepting an invitation to speak about Austin, Debra said, can feel like accepting a future in which Austin is detained. “I feel like, if I even enter the conversation, I am giving my permission to the universe that Austin can stay captive and unhappy,” she said. When their supply of pins or prayer magnets runs low, they have to decide how many more to order, which can lead to wishful thinking. Marc tried to explain how that felt: “Do we order 1500? Do we order 200? No, we don’t want to order any, because –”

“He’s coming home tomorrow,” Debra said.

“He’s coming home tomorrow,” Marc said.

They often wake before dawn to the sound of Google Alerts or WhatsApp messages. “You get up in the middle of the night, and you think, OK – we’re going to deal with this, and then we’re going to get back to sleep,” Marc told me. “That’s not how it works.” Even when they receive tips that seem far-fetched, like newly discovered photographs purporting to show Austin, they feel an obligation to investigate. “Your heart starts racing,” Marc said. “Maybe this is the one.” They always knows what time it is in Syria.

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I suggested that perhaps the global network they had built – the immense goodwill they had created for Austin – was an achievement in itself. No, Debra said. “We have one objective only,” she told me. “We don’t want to get better at anything else having to do with being a ‘hostage family’.” She wants to get back to the ordinary duties of being a mother and grandmother. “To me, that’s the greatest promotion in life.”

At the same time, they are deeply moved when they find support from people they didn’t previously know. Marc’s voice warmed when he remembered a recent tweet by Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post journalist who was detained in Iran from 2014 to 2016. He contacted the Tices soon after his release. “A few weeks ago on the bus, on my way to work I sat next to a woman who had a #FreeAustinTice pin,” Rezaian wrote on Twitter. “I told her I was once the name on one of those pins. It means everything not to be forgotten.”