Syria’s Damascus In the Syrian prison cell where American journalist Austin Tice was briefly detained, cockroaches scuttled out of the walls near a filthy, discolored sink, an ex-inmate told NBC News.
According to Sahar al-Ahmad, he last saw Tice alive in July 2022 while he was in the cell across from him.
I saw him twice. In an interview on Thursday, Ahmad stated that he never spoke to Tice but that he did catch a glimpse of him once while he was exercising and walking.
Ahmad claimed that he had once been disciplined for four hours for disobeying orders and staring at a prisoner. He was able to give a detailed account of the jail, including the number of stairs going to the section where he was being held.
NBC News is unable to independently confirm the treatment he received.
Under the Assads, it was estimated that tens of thousands of Syrians were housed in the nation’s extensive jail system. As soon as the dictatorship collapsed, family members flocked to prisons, military bases, and even black sites to look for loved ones who had been imprisoned.
There were obvious indications that the prison where Ahmad was detained had been hastily abandoned, and it was now governed by Syria’s new rebel coalition. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, is the coalition’s leader and took over the facility shortly after toppling President Bashar al-Assad’s government last Saturday.
Lights were still flickering and blindfolds hung from the walls of the prison, which had been administered by Syria’s dreaded General Intelligence Directorate. In one cage, flat bread and olives showed that someone had eaten their final meal before the Assads’ half-century-long control came to an end.
Perhaps to remind those detained within of life beyond the compound in the Kafr Sousa neighborhood of the Syrian capital, NBC News saw inscriptions in Arabic, Turkish English, and Russian on the walls, along with a calendar that counted down the days and pictures that were all done in charcoal.
There were sketches and drawings of soccer team insignia in other adjacent rooms, and one inmate had made a panoramic view of Istanbul.
Tice, a Houston native, went missing on August 13, 2012, a few days after turning thirty-one, while covering the civil conflict in Syria that had started a year earlier. The U.S. authorities questioned the veracity of the video, claiming it was manufactured, but it did surface soon after his disappearance and showed masked men holding him at gunpoint.
Tice seemed to be in quite excellent health in 2022, according to Ahmad, a citizen journalist and activist who was detained for recording anti-regime protests.
But he claimed that when I saw him, he was slender. He was able to move and walk despite the modest protrusion of his neck bones because he and other inmates were permitted to walk and exercise in the prison hallway for an hour.
According to Ahmad, who is currently stationed in Dubai, Tice looked healthy and was able to move, eat, and talk despite having his hair and eyebrows shaved off to prevent lice, like other inmates.
In an interview with Lester Holt on Monday’s NBC Nightly News, Tice’s parents, Debra and Marc Tice, stated that they had learned that their son was not only alive but also receiving proper care prior to the rebels overthrowing Assad’s regime. They claimed that they were unsure of who was detaining their youngster, though.
Debra Tice stated, “We’re just waiting to see because they’re taking care of the prisons little by little and we know that some of the larger prisons are not places that Austin is.”
Additionally, Obeida Al-Arnout, a prominent rebel leader inside Syria, stated that they were making every effort to locate Austin’s information and return him to his mother, but they had not been successful.
His location is still unknown.
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