A Kidnapping
And the rest of a life, before and after
On All Fronts by Clarissa Ward
All books by Americans are memoirs, whatever their supposed genres. This one is mostly different because it’s a memoir that also includes quite a lot about other people and places.
Clarissa Ward has been senior in CNN’s international coverage for many years, and that’s meant, in this grim time of global crisis, quite a lot of visiting places that are on the brink. Famines, natural disasters, wars. This book is full of that. Human catastrophe, human wreckage. So many lives broken and wasted and thrown away.
Flying from disaster to disaster, seeing the worst of our species endlessly, ceaselessly.
Sure, there are consolations. Some people, but not all, tend to behave admirably when things are bad. But not everyone does. And you see more and more of the latter — more and more evil, building up and accreting and growing everywhere — the more you see of the world. It wears on you; would wear on anyone.
That’s what this memoir’s at least partially about. (And all the usual autobiography about parents, grandparents, having children, thinking of the future. Trying to make sense of existence when there is so much evidence, all around, of the amorality of life on earth, of the random brutality of living and dying and trying to work for a meagre living.)
The period covered by this memoir is headed by the convulsions in the Middle East that surround the story of this century. The wars that followed the September 11 attacks. Their results. And the Arab Spring — long thought dead and interred but making something of a qualified revival in the second half of the 2020s.
This book is not all about Syria and Syria’s civil war and Syria’s suffering — ongoing and seemingly endless when the book was published. But the fate of Syria hangs heavily upon it. Ward was in Syria a great deal before the Assad regime fell. Hearing stories of the displaced by the war, seeing the annihilation of homes, civil infrastructure; attempting, along with much of the country, to count the dead. The regime’s prisons, when they opened; the mass graves.
Among all of this, one episode in the memoir stands out. An earlier event: the story of Austin Tice. Tice was a young America journalist and former marine who went into rebel Syria essentially without support — as a freelancer, as the country’s civil war first intensified in the early 2010s and approached what would be close to a decade and a half of nigh indescribable brutality.
Ward and Tice were close, in near constant contact by email, as he roved rebel-held Syria on his first big overseas reporting expedition. Tice attempting to get into Damascus at the head of what he thought — and which did not turn out to be — a rebel advance to the capital that would displace the regime. But things don’t always go as planned. Tice was more than twelve years early in expecting that.
Tice took a lot of risks that Ward did not appreciate. He exposed himself to too much danger and attracted a lot of attention. Attention good and bad. There weren’t that many Western correspondents in Syria at that time. Big media brands abroad were sceptical of local fixers and reporters. And didn’t want to hire them. So any white faces in Syria with American accents, who’d spent any time at a university like Georgetown, as Tice had, would get commissions. Jobs with CBS, commissions from a number of magazines. And he did solid work. Americans care a good deal about awards. Tice’s reporting was worthy of awards.
All well and good. But this also meant attention from the regime of Bashar al-Assad, and its immense, sprawling intelligence apparat, whose campaign against all non-compliant media — foreign and local — was only getting going in those days. An inextricable part of its war on civilian life, and on the truth.
In Ward’s telling — both in this book and in interviews with an excellent Economist podcast series on Tice — she was an attempted restraining hand.
When Tice — a tall, well-built man — wanted to dress as a woman in disguise or to sprint boldly through pro-regime checkpoints, Ward suggested to him that this was absurd and reckless.
And it was clear, and he must have been told, that if Tice fell into the hands of the regime, he would not only make his own torture and murder very likely. It was also true that his capture, interrogation and the seizing of his devices and notes would help his captors in their hunt for every friend he’d ever made in Syria, every source he’d ever had, every attendee of every protest he’d ever filmed.
How seriously he took these warnings, of course, we’ll never know. Because Austin Tice disappeared in August 2012 and has never been seen since. He was due to leave Syria only a little time after his capture, to take a bit of a break, and to meet up with Ward in Beirut.
The American state has been resolute in its public pretence that Tice is alive and they know who’s holding him. But it’s been thirteen years. The former regime fell; a lot of people escaped its prisons, including some Americans. None of them were Tice. The regime’s mass graves are still being surveyed. At some point, even the American state has to face reality.