Live Updates: Blinken Arrives in Jordan for Talks on Syria
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was in Aqaba, Jordan, and planned to continue on to Turkey, as the Biden administration tries to manage the aftermath of Bashar al-Assad’s fall to Islamist rebels.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken arrived in Jordan on Thursday as the Biden administration scrambles to respond to the fall of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria to militias, including a powerful Islamist group that now controls the capital, Damascus.
Mr. Blinken was in Aqaba, Jordan, and planned to continue on to Turkey. The State Department said before his arrival that he would press officials in both countries for help in ensuring a transition to an “accountable and representative” new Syrian government that respects the rights of minorities and can “prevent Syria from being used as a base of terrorism or posing a threat to its neighbors.”
He also planned to seek assurances that Syria’s new leaders would “ensure that chemical weapons stockpiles are secured and safely destroyed,” the State Department said.
Here are other developments:
Missing American: The Syrian authorities said that a foreign man who had been imprisoned under the Assad government had been found outside Damascus and handed over to the rebel group that now controls the capital. In interviews with international news media, the man appeared to identify himself as Travis Timmerman, an American who is believed to have gone missing from Budapest, Hungary, this year.
Seeking justice: The fall of Syria’s government has breathed new life into a long push for justice over crimes committed by the Assad regime, allowing human rights groups the long-awaited opportunity to inspect prison sites, freely interview witnesses and build legal cases. But there is also frustration because the ultimate goal of the effort would be to see Mr. al-Assad stand trial, and he appears out of reach, having taken exile in Russia.
Mood in Aleppo: In the northern Syrian city that rebels seized last week before taking Damascus, there was celebration as exiled residents returned home and assessed what remained after more than a decade of civil war. They set out to visit old neighborhoods and homes, some of which no longer existed.
Russia in Syria: Satellite imagery and ship tracking data reviewed by The New York Times show that Russian naval and commercial activity in the key Syrian port of Tartus — which has played a critical role in Moscow’s projection of military power in the region — has ceased since the Assad government fell on Sunday.
A photo provided by Turkish state media said to show Travis Pete Timmerman, a U.S. citizen who was believed missing for several months, speaking to reporters in Syria on Thursday.Credit...Abdulkarem Al Mohammad/Anadolu, via Getty Images
The Syrian authorities said on Thursday that a foreign man who had been imprisoned while Bashar al-Assad was in power had been found outside Damascus and handed over to the rebel group that now controls the capital.
In interviews with international news media, the man appeared to identify himself as Travis Timmerman, an American who is believed to have gone missing from Budapest, Hungary, this year. In a video aired on Thursday by the news channel Al Arabiya, someone is heard asking the man if his name is Travis Timmerman. The man says, “That’s right.”
Hisham al-Eid, the mayor of Al-Thihabiyeh, a poor, partly rural town east of Damascus, said that the man had been found on Thursday morning on a main road. He was barefoot and cold but otherwise seemed to be in good health, Mr. al-Eid said.
The man told reporters that he had entered Syria from Lebanon on a Christian pilgrimage, and had been detained for several months. He said he had received food and water while in detention, and was allowed to go to the bathroom three times a day.
In another video posted by Al Arabiya, the man, wearing a beard and a gray hooded top, said that he had been held in a cell alone. When asked how he was freed, he said that on Monday, someone “took a hammer and they broke my door down.”
It was not immediately clear where the man had been held. The fall of the authoritarian Assad regime over the weekend to rebel forces led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has prompted the release of many prisoners held in a sprawling network of detention centers operated by the former government.
This year, the Missouri State Highway Patrol put out a missing persons flyer for Pete Timmerman, 29, saying he had last been located in Budapest, the Hungarian capital, on May 28. In August, the Hungarian police put out a call looking for “Travis Pete Timmerman” and shared photos of a man who resembles the one in the Al Arabiya interview.
The man told CBS News on Thursday that he had been in contact with his family three weeks ago, using a phone that he had while he was in prison. He said that he had left the prison where he had been held with a large group of people and that he had been trying to get to Jordan. It was unclear how he had arrived in the town where he was found.
Asked by reporters whether he had processed his newfound freedom, he said, “I still haven’t really thought about that,” CBS reported. “I’ve been more worried about finding a place to sleep each night since then.”
Lynsey Chutel, Andrew Higgins, Ismaeel Naar and Barnabas Heincz contributed reporting.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken has arrived in Aqaba, Jordan, on the Red Sea, for talks on Syria. He is scheduled to meet today with King Abdullah II and Jordan’s foreign minister, Ayman Safadi.
People celebrated in the center of Damascus, Syria’s capital, on Monday. The Assad family ruled the country brutally for more than 50 years.Credit...Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times
The fall of Syria’s government has breathed new life into a long push for justice over crimes committed by the Assad regime. Now, at last, there is a chance for human rights groups to inspect prison sites, freely interview witnesses and quickly build legal cases for prosecution.
Yet there is also frustration because the ultimate goal of the effort would be to see the deposed president, Bashar al-Assad, stand trial, according to rights activists who spoke this week about their work on Syria.
With Mr. al-Assad in Russia, according to officials in Moscow, that prospect appears out of reach. Activists, many of whom have devoted years to the effort, remain undeterred.
“We are targeting the system,” said Fadel Abdul Ghany, director of the Syrian Network for Human Rights. “The Assad regime is not just the man himself. We need to target the security forces and the army and the tools Assad used to commit those crimes.”
The war in Syria has been a watershed for human rights work, in part because of the scale of the abuses committed. In addition to the more than 200,000 civilians reported to have been killed in the war, at least 15,000 people are believed to have died from torture or to have been killed in the regime’s prison system, and some 130,000 are still missing, according to Mr. Abdul Ghany’s group.
Organizations including the Commission for International Justice and Accountability and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights have worked to document abuses and crimes to lay the groundwork for future prosecutions.
That drive received a major boost in its early years when a former Syrian police photographer, code-named Caesar, defected in 2013 with gruesome photographs of thousands of prisoners who had been killed in detention.
Rights groups said that they had benefited from the regime’s practice of documenting what happened in the prison system for bureaucratic purposes. The groups have made use of digital tools that were not available in previous conflicts to catalog abuses.
Mr. al-Assad has said that anyone in prison in Syria committed a crime, and cast doubt on testimony about abuses. But activists said the records enabled them to trace links between perpetrators, such as prison guards and policymakers, in a crucial step toward any prosecutions of senior officials.
“Even before he fell from power, we already had enough documents to show beyond reasonable doubt his real power over the machinery of death that the Syrian state was,” said Nerma Jelacic of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability.
Augmenting those efforts, other groups are cataloging the Assad government’s crimes, including a U.N. Syria Commission, which has issued detailed reports, and a group established by the U.N. General Assembly. All that work has borne fruit in several prosecutions of Syrian officials abroad.
The most prominent of them began in The Hague last year at the International Court of Justice, which held a hearing after a complaint by Canada and the Netherlands saying that violations in Syria had been committed on a “massive scale.”
The year before, a German court sentenced a former Syrian intelligence officer to life in prison after he was convicted of crimes against humanity.
French judges last year issued an international arrest warrant for Mr. al-Assad for complicity in both crimes against humanity and war crimes, following an investigation into chemical attacks in 2013. And just this week, the U.S. Justice Department charged two top Syrian military officials with war crimes committed against Americans and others at a prison in Damascus.
But several factors have inhibited the push for accountability. For one, defections stopped around 2015, when Mr. al-Assad’s regime appeared to have stabilized, cutting off one source of testimony about abuses. More significantly, Syria is not a member of the International Criminal Court, so the court does not have jurisdiction over crimes committed on its soil. Russia and China vetoed a resolution in the U.N. Security Council to refer Syria to the court, blocking that avenue.
“Up until now the doors to the courtroom have largely been elusive,” said Balkees Jarrah, a lawyer and senior official with the international justice program at Human Rights Watch. “With this sudden political change there is a critical window, but a better future for Syria requires a comprehensive plan for justice.”
With Mr. al-Assad gone, one option would be for the rebels now in power to accept the international court’s jurisdiction over Syria, giving the court’s prosecutor, Karim Khan, the authority to open investigations retroactively, several experts said. In doing so it would follow Ukraine, which has granted the court jurisdiction over its territory even though it is not a member.
Mr. Abdul Ghany, who is Syrian, said the country should also become a member of the court as part of the process of re-establishing the rule of law.
A second option would be for national courts to file charges under the concept of universal jurisdiction, under which any national court may prosecute individuals accused of heinous offenses.
While prosecutions in venues outside Syria matter, it is far more important to restore the country’s own judicial system and start the process of holding officials accountable in national courts, the experts said.
Such prosecutions have had a powerful impact in other post-conflict countries, enabling citizens to witness justice at work, according to Stephen J. Rapp, a former international prosecutor and former U.S. ambassador at large for global justice who has been involved with Syria for more than a decade.
“Even where we have had a successful international justice process, the national cases were more helpful in allowing reconciliation,” Mr. Rapp said.
The leader of the alliance that toppled the government, Ahmed al-Shara, also known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, said on Tuesday that the new administration would hold “criminals, murderers and military and security officials” who committed torture accountable — suggesting at least the possibility that starting a domestic legal process against them was a high priority.
To assist with that effort, one of the most prominent Syrian human rights leaders, Mouaz Moustafa, head of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, said on Monday that he was immediately returning to the country.
Young men, some of them rebel fighters, on a giant statue on Wednesday in Aleppo, Syria, that previously depicted Basel al-Assad, former President Bashar al-Assad’s late brother, riding a horse.
The many monuments of the Assad regime that once dotted the Syrian city of Aleppo have been toppled, torn or burned.
The large statue on which President Bashar al-Assad’s late brother was featured riding a horse has been mostly destroyed. All that remains is the rearing animal, with boys and young men clamoring to get on top of it as they flash victory signs.
Across Aleppo on Wednesday there was celebration as exiled residents returned home more than a week after Syrian rebels captured the city in a lightning-fast offensive that ended with Mr. al-Assad’s ouster.
They came back to their city from across the border with Turkey or from elsewhere — somewhere safer — if not permanently, then at least to assess what remained and where they might live. They set out to visit old neighborhoods and homes, some of which no longer existed.
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Celebrating the fall of the Syrian regime in Aleppo on Wednesday.
Amar Sabir, 23, fled the city nearly 10 years ago with her family and ended up in Turkey. There, she got married and had two children, but never gave up hope of returning to Aleppo. On Sunday, she did.
“God willing, we’ll never have to leave Syria again,” she said, standing with her back to the horse statue.
Her cousins were taking her around the city to reacquaint her with the landmarks and historical sites. “This is going to become a historic place,” she said.
“This is where they brought down the regime,” said her husband, Basil al-Hassan.
Their first stop had been to the 13th-century citadel, a towering medieval structure rising above the city. Once a fortress, the landmark is the most famous structure in all of Aleppo, and one of the most enduring in the city. There, little boys hawked Syrian flags to people eager to pose with it. At the gated entrance of the citadel, a popcorn seller played a protest song on repeat, the chorus a reproach to the ousted Assad regime: “He who kills his people is a traitor.”
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Selling sweets and nuts in front of ruined buildings in Aleppo.
The song was mostly drowned out by a nearby drum circle, which paused its celebration briefly only during the call to prayer. Several men pounded their drums as others jumped and danced, twirling like whirling dervishes.
Ali Siraaj Ali, 44, had also fled Aleppo during the war. Wednesday was his first day back. He, too, went to the citadel first, bringing his son. “God willing, we’ll be happy,” the father said, after dancing excitedly, catching his breath. “But it’s unknown.”
Though excitement and frenzy were on full display in some parts of Aleppo, the city was still gripped by uncertainty and grim reminders of the 13-year civil war.
Farther down the street from the damaged equestrian statue were the remnants of one of Mr. al-Assad’s last acts of violence: a small crater where a rocket tore through a crowd on Nov. 30, killing about 15 people and wounding dozens more. Dried blood stained the sidewalk. But most visitors didn’t seem to notice.
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Blood stains were still visible on the steps of a square in Aleppo where 15 people had been killed in one of the final airstrikes by the regime before its collapse.
In the Salahuldeen neighborhood, where the first battles between antigovernment rebels and Assad forces were fought beginning in 2012, Zuhair Khateeb felt uneasy.
Standing next to his small mechanics shop, Mr. Khateeb tore pita bread into small pieces and threw them to about 10 pet pigeons at his feet. The clinking of tiny bracelets around the birds’ legs provided a whimsical soundtrack to a grim discussion.
All around Mr. Khateeb, 43, were piles of rubble, what remained of the homes and buildings that had been destroyed by Syrian airstrikes years ago. Other buildings in the neighborhood appeared to be torn in half. The government never came to clear any of it away or to rebuild.
Residents, Mr. Khateeb said, were not allowed to. “No one did anything here,” he said. “This was a slow death. They wanted to kill us slowly, and we couldn’t say anything.”
He worked day and night to save up money to send his eldest son to Dubai so the teenager could avoid mandatory military service under the Syrian government.
In the weeks before the surprise rebel offensive started last month, the military began combing Aleppo’s neighborhoods, sweeping up large groups of men in their 30s and 40s, he said. Now that the regime is gone, he hopes his son can return home from Dubai.
Others are coming back to the neighborhood even though they don’t have anywhere to live, he said. “Based on what people are saying, God willing, there is something better to come,” added Mr. Khateeb. “But we’ve seen and suffered a lot already.”
At a park called President’s Square, another toppled monument lay face down on the ground. What used to represent the head of Hafez al-Assad, Mr. al-Assad’s father and a former president, was barely recognizable, a piece of shattered stone attached to shoulders by a few twisted rods of rebar.
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What remained of a destroyed statue of Hafez al-Assad, Mr. al-Assad’s father.
Abdulhadi Ghazal, 17, sat on the pedestal that once held the now-desecrated bust, posing like Rodin’s “Thinker.” Someone had graffitied the words “11/30 the square of the free” on the pedestal.
“I was sitting where the leader was; I wanted to sit in his place,” said the teenager, a smattering of a mustache across his upper lip. But when a few people started taking his picture, he jumped off, fearful of what might happen to him if he were seen disrespecting a regime that still inspires fear in Syria.
“We saw so many people in prison, we got scared,” he said, referring to the images of emaciated and tortured prisoners that have emerged in recent days. “We’re scared the president might return.”
He wasn’t in the square when the bust was destroyed, but after he saw a video of it online, he said, he wanted to come and see it for himself — and to stand where the statue once stood.
Others simply spat at it.
At City Hall across the street, officials with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and other rebel groups that helped take down the Assad family are scrambling to form a government that will oversee the cities and towns they now control.
A large photo of Mr. al-Assad still hangs, untouched, outside the building. No one has gotten around to removing it yet.
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The former frontline area in the Salaheddin neighborhood of Aleppo.
Destroyed trucks loaded with weapons for a Kurdish-led force after a Turkish airstrike near Qamishli, northeastern Syria, on Wednesday.Credit...Ahmed Mardnli/EPA, via Shutterstock
The commander of Syria’s largest Kurdish militia has accused the United States of abandoning its Kurdish allies in Syria, key partners in America’s fight against the Islamic State, and warned of a resurgence by the Islamic State amid political uncertainty in Syria.
Kurdish forces played an essential role in helping the United States and other countries battle the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. In the years since, as Syria languished in a protracted civil war, the Kurds, with U.S. backing, operated prisons filled with fighters accused of being ISIS terrorists, managed massive camps of displaced people and established an autonomous civil government in northern Syria.
But in recent days, as rebels elsewhere in the country toppled the Assad regime, plunging the country into a new and precarious position, the Kurds, who control northeastern Syria, have come under assault by militant groups backed by Turkey, a longtime adversary. In clashes in Manbij and Kobani their forces have been attacked by fighters aided by Turkish drones and air power.
As the fighting has intensified between the Kurds and Turkey-backed groups, the main Kurdish militia, the Syrian Democratic Forces, said it had to divert fighters from defending the prisons that house accused ISIS members to positions on the front lines.
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Gen. Mazlum Kobani, commander of the U.S.-backed Kurdish force, at his office on the outskirts of Al Hasaka, Syria, in 2022.Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
“This leaves a vacuum behind that can be taken advantage by ISIS and other actors,” the S.D.F.’s top general, known by the nom de guerre Mazlum Kobani, said early on Wednesday.
Over 9,000 ISIS fighters are housed in over 20 S.D.F. facilities throughout Syria, Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, chief of the U.S. military’s Central Command, said in a statement in September.
General Kobani said Washington’s failure to stop Turkey and its proxies from attacking the Kurds had endangered the peace U.S. forces had fought to establish.
“We and the Americans liberated this city together,” Gen. Kobani said of Manbij. The battles there against ISIS, he added, cost “lots of souls and lives.” But when the Turkish-backed rebel groups began their assault on Kurdish forces there last week, he said, “there was no firm position from the U.S. side” to offer help.
The Kurds have been instrumental partners for the United States in fighting ISIS, an Islamist terrorist group bent on establishing a global caliphate, for more than a decade. But Turkey views armed Kurds so close to its border as a threat. For decades Turkey has fought Kurdish separatists, who seek to carve out an independent country.
America’s divided allegiances between their Turkish and Kurdish allies have been expressed in recent comments by U.S. officials.
The U.S. has an interest in defeating ISIS, John Kirby, the White House National Security Communications Advisor, said at a news briefing on Tuesday, and “that means partnering with the Syrian Democratic Forces.”
But he added, “the Turks have a legitimate counterterrorism threat,” for which they “have a right to defend their citizens in their territory against terrorist attacks.”
When those goals overlap or conflict, Mr. Kirby said, the United States and Turkey would discuss “how both those outcomes can be achieved.”
The Department of Defense on Wednesday did not immediately comment on Gen. Kobani’s suggestion that the U.S. was abandoning its Kurdish allies. On Tuesday, ahead of a U.S.-brokered truce in the city of Kobani, General Kurilla visited American and Kurdish forces in Syria and met with Gen. Kobani.
Gen. Kobani said that no U.S. troops had been involved in the recent fighting and that U.S. military support was limited to some drone observation and acting as intermediaries between the S.D.F. and other groups, to ensure the evacuation of civilians from areas with fighting.
On Wednesday, SDF, said it had agreed to a U.S.-brokered cease-fire in the city of Manbij, which included that the group’s forces would be withdrawn. According to a war monitoring group, this withdrawal ends more than eight years of the group’s control of the city.
The United States did not immediately confirm its role.
“There is no American decision to protect the areas we liberated together from ISIS,” Gen. Kobani said in a translated interview. The expansion of fighting in northern Syria between armed Kurdish and Turkish-backed groups, has put the United States and Turkey — two NATO allies — at odds.
In 2019, President Trump withdrew U.S. forces from posts near the Turkish border, leaving the Kurds more vulnerable to attack, but about 900 American troops remain in Syria, working with the Kurds.
John Ismay and Cassandra Vinograd contributed reporting.
Large Russian naval vessels were visible in earlier satellite imagery of the port in the seaside Syrian city of Tartus, but images captured on Tuesday showed that none remain.Credit...Maxar Technologies
Satellite imagery and ship tracking data reviewed by The New York Times show that Russian naval and commercial activity in the key Syrian port of Tartus — which has played a critical role in Moscow’s projection of military power in the region — has ceased since Bashar al-Assad’s government fell on Sunday.
Five large Russian military vessels and a submarine were visible in the port in satellite images captured on Dec. 5 and 6, but had departed in images taken on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.
The satellite images captured on Tuesday show two of three frigates loitering several miles offshore. It is unclear whether the ships will stay in this location in the near future, or sail to another destination.
Imagery captured on Tuesday by Maxar Technologies, a satellite company, showed two Russian naval frigates loitering off the coast of Syria.
Since the deepwater port at Tartus was established in 1971, Moscow has maintained a nearly continuous presence there, first for the Soviet Union and then for Russia. It is Russia’s only such port in the Mediterranean.
Among the vessels still docked at Tartus are what appear to be several small Syrian naval ships, despite claims by Israel’s defense ministry that Israeli airstrikes had completely destroyed the Syrian Navy in the port city of Latakia on Tuesday.
No cargo ships have entered or departed from Tartus since at least Monday, according to ship tracking data from MarineTraffic, a commercial ship tracking agency. Two small commercial vessels arrived in the waters outside the port on Monday and Wednesday morning but have not yet docked at the port itself, according to MarineTraffic.
Other ships are shunning the port entirely. Two Russian vessels that regularlytransportgrain from Russia and Russian-occupied Ukraine to Syria and appeared to been route for another delivery to Tartus have altered course in recent days. The ships, including the Mikhail Nenashev, are currently circling off the coast of Cyprus.
Mersin
Turkey
No
position
signal
Dec. 4
Path taken by Mikhail Nenashev
Latakia
Syria
Northern
Cyprus
Dec. 8
Tartus
Cyprus
Tripoli
Mediterranean Sea
Lebanon
Beirut
50 miles
Turkey
Mersin
No
position
signal
Dec. 4
Path taken by
Mikhail Nenashev
Latakia
Syria
Northern
Cyprus
Dec. 8
Tartus
Cyprus
Tripoli
Mediterranean Sea
Lebanon
Beirut
50 miles
Source: MarineTraffic
By Nick Underwood
An Iranian oil tanker, the Lotus, carrying 750,000 barrels of crude oil and destined for Syria, abruptly turned around in the Red Sea on Sunday morning, The Times reported earlier.
Syria under Mr. al-Assad was heavily dependent on oil from its ally Iran to sustain its refineries, according to Viktor Katona, head of oil analysis at Kpler, a company that monitors global trade.
“With Iranian tankers making a U-turn after Assad’s departure, transportation fuels would be a rarity in Syria as the country would most probably start running out of diesel and gasoline inventories quite soon,” Mr. Katona said.
Sednaya prison in Damascus on Monday. Credit...Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times
The United States has identified a handful of prisons in Syria that might provide clues to the fate of Austin Tice, an American journalist who was abducted in 2012 and believed held by the Syrian government.
The prisons were run by Syrian military intelligence and the Republican Guard, the elite forces stationed in Damascus, Syria’s capital. The U.S. government imposed sanctions on several military intelligence locations in 2021 for human rights abuses.
The Biden administration has long prioritized finding Mr. Tice. But the sudden collapse of President Bashar al-Assad’s reign in Syria has given new urgency to the efforts and intensified hope that U.S. officials can finally learn Mr. Tice’s fate.
A senior administration official said that the U.S. government was working to find Mr. Tice and bring him home, but the official added that the United States did not have “new verifiable information” on his location.
The case has frustrated U.S. intelligence officials. The Syrian government has never acknowledged holding Mr. Tice and has shunned opportunities to make a deal for his release.
U.S. officials said the Trump administration and the Biden administration had both worked hard on the case. Several years ago, the C.I.A. created what is known as a targeting cell overseen by the intelligence analyst who had supervised the hunt for Osama bin Laden, a sign of how important the issue is to the agency.
In more recent years there was a feeling, at least with some officials, that the case had grown cold. But that all changed in the last week. The fall of the Assad government has unlocked opportunities, current and former officials said.
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Debra and Marc Tice, the parents of Austin Tice, at a media conference in Beirut in 2018. Credit...Bilal Hussein/Associated Press
The rebel groups who toppled the government have emptied Syria’s political prisons, releasing people who may have information about Mr. Tice and potentially giving access to records that could shed light. Former prisoners and members of Mr. al-Assad’s government may finally be able to talk.
But the high-ranking Syrians who U.S. officials have long suspected have information about Mr. Tice’s disappearance remain elusive. They include Ali Mamlouk, a former head of Syria’s National Security Bureau intelligence service; Kifah Moulhem, who succeeded Mr. Mamlouk; Maher al-Assad, Mr. al-Assad’s brother; and Bassam al-Hassan, a top general.
On Sunday, President Biden expressed optimism that Mr. Tice could be found and brought home.
“We believe he’s alive,” Mr. Biden said. “We think we can get him back but we have no direct evidence of that yet. And Assad should be held accountable.”
But in subsequent comments, White House officials tempered expectations. On Tuesday, John F. Kirby, a National Security Council spokesman, said that the fall of the Assad government “could present an opportunity for us to glean more information about him, his whereabouts, his condition.”
Mr. Kirby said the administration was “pushing as hard as we can to learn as much as we can.”
“We want to see him home with his family where he belongs,” Mr. Kirby said.
Image
A rebel fighter walking through the abandoned presidential palace in Damascus on Tuesday. Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times
Hours later, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, tried to walk a fine line between showing the administration’s work on Mr. Tice’s case without raising hopes further.
“We do not know his location and we do not know his condition, so we are trying to do everything we can do to get that information,” she said. “We are committed to bringing him home.”
The U.S. government’s stance has not shifted dramatically in the years since the C.I.A. targeting cell was created to find Mr. Tice. American officials have no concrete evidence that he is dead, so they continue to work under the assumption that he might be alive.
U.S. military officials said no hostage rescue mission was being prepared, or even planned, a sign that the view that Mr. Tice could be brought home is a minority view.
But U.S. officials said that the American military, the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. were trying to work through partners and sources to learn more in the current chaos. Officials are trying to get hold of any Syrian government documents or other records that might indicate where Mr. Tice was held, when he was moved and what happened to him in captivity.
When Israel began bombing Syrian military installations, the United States asked Israeli officials to avoid striking prisons where Mr. Tice might have been held or that have information about his whereabouts.
Mr. Tice vanished as Syria descended into civil war, but soon appeared blindfolded in a video, surrounded by armed captors. The circumstances of his capture are murky, but U.S. officials have said the Syrian government ultimately took him into custody.
Investigators learned that he had been initially taken to a prison in Damascus and had been seen by a doctor, according to U.S. officials and other people familiar with the matter. Mr. Tice managed to escape for about a week but was recaptured, the people said.
Efforts to reach the doctor since Mr. al-Assad’s government crumbled have been unsuccessful.
What happened to Mr. Tice since then remains a mystery, but at some point U.S. intelligence obtained a Syrian document indicating that the Assad government had been holding Mr. Tice. Former U.S. officials described it as a type of judicial form, possibly showing a prisoner or arrest number.
Over the years, U.S. officials had sought to engage the Syrian government with little success. In 2017, Michael Pompeo, then C.IA. director, spoke with Mr. Mamlouk, the head of the National Security Bureau intelligence service, about Mr. Tice. Another top C.I.A. official traveled to Damascus and also raised the subject of Mr. Tice.
In the final months of the Trump administration, two senior U.S. officials went to Syria: Roger D. Carstens, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, and Kash Patel, whom Mr. Trump has named as his pick to be F.B.I. director.
During the Biden administration, Brett McGurk, the president’s Middle East coordinator, and other officials met twice with Imad Moustapha, a former Syrian ambassador.
In the meetings, the Syrians did not disclose anything about Mr. Tice.
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Aleppo, SyriaSelling sweets and nuts in front of ruined buildings in the town center on Wednesday.![[object Object]](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/12/12/multimedia/12syria-live-carousel-01-jwzv/12syria-live-carousel-01-jwzv-threeByTwoMediumAt2X-v2.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp)
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