Secretary of State Mike Pompeo revealed President Trump sent a letter to Syrian President Bashar Assad requesting that his government assist in the locating and release of Austin Tice.
The Trump administration marked on Friday how it has been eight years since the U.S. journalist and former Marine disappeared in Syria. McClatchy and other news outlets reported that Tice was arrested at a checkpoint in Darayya, a suburb of Damascus. Shortly after Tice’s capture, a video of him was released by unknown armed men, but he hasn’t been heard from since.
“The U.S. government has repeatedly attempted to engage Syrian officials to seek Austin’s release. President Trump wrote to Bashar Al-Assad in March to propose direct dialogue,” Pompeo said in a statement Friday. “No one should doubt the President’s commitment to bringing home all U.S. citizens held hostage or wrongfully detained overseas. Nowhere is that determination stronger than in Austin Tice’s case.”
Former national security adviser John Bolton wrote in his new book, The Room Where it Happened, that he and Pompeo were less than enthusiastic about Trump’s efforts to reach out to Assad on the issue of U.S. hostages in the country. “All these negotiations about our role in Syria were complicated by Trump’s constant desire to call Assad on US hostages, which Pompeo and I thought undesirable. Fortunately, Syria saved Trump from himself, refusing even to talk to Pompeo about them,” Bolton wrote.
He added, “When we reported this, Trump responded angrily: ‘You tell [them] he will get hit hard if they don’t give us our hostages back, so f—–g hard. You tell him that. We want them back within one week of today, or they will never forget how hard we’ll hit them.'”
Trump and Pompeo have both objected to Bolton’s book as an inaccurate account of what occurred during his tenure.
Tice’s parents noted this portion of Bolton’s book in a statement they wrote for the Washington Post earlier this month.
“Direct dialogue between the U.S. and Syria is the channel for Austin’s release,” they wrote, adding, “Each year around Austin’s birthday and the date of his capture, there’s a brief moment of renewed attention and media coverage. Our son is imprisoned every single day. Every single day Austin needs his colleagues in journalism to ask questions about what is being done to bring him home, to dig for answers when they meet with obfuscation, and to hold U.S. government officials accountable for their actions or lack thereof.”
In a statement issued Friday, the president wrote, “The Tice family deserves answers. We stand with the Tice family and will not rest until we bring Austin home.“
Source: RT + AFP
