On Tuesday, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said the US had asked Syria’s main rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) to help locate and free US journalist Austin Tice.
A freelance journalist, Mr Tice is thought to have been taken captive close to Damascus on 14 August 2012 while he was covering the country’s civil war.
He was last seen in a video, blindfolded and in apparent distress – posted online weeks after his capture. The US believes he was being held by the Assad regime.
President Joe Biden has said the US believes Mr Tice is alive, but they must pinpoint his location.
Syria’s new leadership said on Thursday the search for Mr Tice was “ongoing,” and that it was ready to “cooperate directly” with the US to find Americans that disappeared under the Assad regime.
The now collapsed regime was notorious for its extremely harsh prisons, where the UK-based monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimates almost 60,000 people were tortured and killed.
Across Syria this week, families desperate to find loved ones have been streaming into these dark prison sites.
The Syrian Civil Defence Organisation, known as the White Helmets, has been helping the search – including in the infamous Saydnaya prison complex, described by human rights groups as the “human slaughterhouse”.
“We’re looking for secret prisons in several areas of Damascus,” Raed Saleh, director of The White Helmets told the BBC.
“We can’t say too much about this, but we’re looking.”
The White Helmets, known for pulling survivors from the rubble during Syria’s devastating civil war, say they helped recover thousands of detainees from the prisons.
But many families are still searching in vain.
“What took place in Saydnaya is very painful for the families who were waiting for their loved ones,” Saleh acknowledged.
“Our inability to reach anyone else in Saydnaya after the initial release of prisoners means that those people who were there are either dead or in another place.
“We have at least two teams looking for prisoners.
“One team with police sniffer dogs is looking for survivors. Another team is specialised in lock breaking and entering cells.”
