An independent rescue group is working tirelessly to free Austin Tice and other Americans still in Syria in the wake of the fall of the Assad regime.
Rescue of the gray bull founder Bryan Stern says the situation for Tice is likely dire.
Speaking to DailyMail.com, Stern said there was circumstantial and second-hand information indicating Tice was alive just before the rebels overthrew Bashar al-Assad just over a week ago.
But with prisons and other buildings in Syria abandoned in the fall, the group now fears Tice has gone without food or water for the past eight days.
Stern and his team, who rescue Americans from war zones and unstable foreign countries, are now devoting their resources to find Tice and bring him back to the US.
“One of the nuances here is that if you assume that Austin is still alive, or at least until the moment the Assad regime fell – if you accept all of that as true, the facilities he was in have since been abandoned,” Stern explained.
“He’s probably, if he’s being held and if he’s still alive, hidden in a secret room, in a secret place, in a secret building, in a secret tunnel – one of those deals,” he continued. “Very, very, very few people know that, which means that from a tactical perspective, Austin has probably been in a room for eight days with no food and no water.”
Tice, a Marine Corps veteran, was kidnapped in Darayya, Syria, in 2012 while working in the country as a freelance journalist for multiple media outlets, including McClatchy, The Washington Post and CBS News.
The situation for Austin Tice is growing more dire by the hour, rescue group Gray Bull says as they work to extradite kidnapped journalist from Syria.
With the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, Gray Bull Rescue founder Bryan Stern tells DailyMail.com that this time of transition is the opportunity to free Tice and other Americans.
For Tice and other captured Americans, the situation becomes increasingly urgent, with the risk that others will discover him first – or that his location will remain untraceable until it is too late.
Stern’s group is known for getting Americans out of war zones, including in Israel, Gaza and Lebanon. They also conducted operations in Haiti and Ukraine.
Tice’s case has been on Gray Bull Rescue’s radar for more than three years and with the situation in Syria rapidly evolving, Stern’s deep connections in the Middle East have placed him in the unique position to oversee this complex operation .
Biden said on Sunday that Tice is still alive and that the US is working to find his location and extradite him from Syria during the transition period to a new administration.
“We believe he is alive,” Biden said Sunday as he delivered remarks moments after the Assad regime failed. “We think we can get him back, but we don’t have any direct evidence of that yet.”
“And Assad must be held accountable,” he emphasized.
Stern says his group is in contact with several U.S. federal government agencies while it operates in Syria. In particular, he speaks with people from the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“We’re all on the same team there,” Stern insisted. “They wake up every day to protect Americans, and so do we.”
Bryan Stern (pictured) said Tice is likely in a hidden facility that was abandoned when the Assad regime fell and fears he has been without food or water for eight days
Tice, a Marine Corps veteran, was kidnapped in Syria in 2012 while working as a freelance journalist. His captors released a video of Tice, blindfolded and tied up, about a month after he disappeared
He revealed, “Sometimes that relationship is a little complicated and sometimes it’s not that smooth, but at the end of the day, Gray Bull has a very good relationship with the U.S. government.”
“And a lot of that is because they know that we’re doing the right thing, and we’re not getting in the way, and we’re doing good work, and we’re also not political. A, we’re fast, right? We are fast. We don’t have to talk to twenty layers of idiots to arrive at a yes or a no. We can simply make decisions.’
There are other relationships that Stern says he may not be as proud of.
“We have networks everywhere,” he told DailyMail.com. “We have people we’re proud to talk to, and then we have people we don’t exactly – who aren’t always so proud of those relationships.”
“When you conduct operations in war zones, you come into close proximity with bad guys, just the way it is.”