US chief hostage negotiator calls Syrian secret jails horrifying and disturbing, 'yet fascinating'

Roger Carstens says having 35 or 40 secret prisons for the government's enemies stunned him

The US special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, Roger Carstens. Global Security Forum

The chief US hostage negotiator on Sunday spoke about former president Bashar Al Assad's secret regime prisons in Syria as he continues the search for detained American journalist Austin Tice.

“If I'm stunned by anything, it's just the amount of prisons. I mean, you'd almost think that if you were running a country and you wanted to jail your enemies, you'd have one prison, and it wouldn't be secret – but to have like 35 or 40 secret prisons, I find that just horrifying, disturbing and yet, in a way, fascinating,” Roger Carstens told CBS from Jordan's Amman.

According to the International Commission on Missing Persons, about 150,000 people are unaccounted for in Syria, and many of them are believed to have disappeared into the country's prisons.

Human rights groups have documented torture, sexual violence and mass killings inside the prisons, and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has said that more than 100,000 people died in jails and detention centres since 2011.

“It's not going to shock me to find out that there are prisons that have yet to be discovered and searched,” Mr Carstens said.

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He said the US and the “general public” were “on the hunt” for Tice, who disappeared from Damascus in 2012 while he was covering the Syrian civil war as a freelance reporter. US officials, including President Joe Biden, have said they believe he is still alive and that he has been held by the Assad regime.

In August 2022, the US said it knew with “certainty” that the journalist was being held by the Syrian government. Damascus has denied holding Tice. After the fall of Mr Al Assad this month, Tice's family announced they had received new evidence that he is alive and being “treated well”.

Mr Carstens said that Syria's interim leaders have been helpful. “I've been talking to them for, I want to say … probably nine or 10 days, and they've been helpful in conducting the search,” he said, referring to members of Hayat Tahrir Al Sham. “They were definitely helpful.”