New reporting from June 15th, 2025, has reignited outrage over the fate of missing American journalist Austin Tice, who disappeared in Syria in 2012. According to a former senior Syrian official, Bassam al-Hassan, Tice was executed in 2013 on direct orders from then Syrian President Bashar al-Assad after briefly escaping captivity. The Committee to Protect Journalists has called these claims "horrifying" and demanded transparency from both Syria and the United States. While these reports remain unconfirmed, they follow years of witness sightings—including a 2022 account from a Syrian detainee who claims he was held in the same prison as Tice.
If true, this would mark another failure by the U.S. government to bring home its own—a repeat of the case of Bob Levinson. Bob died in Iranian custody after years of soft diplomacy and aid deals that never made his release a requirement. Levinson, a retired FBI agent, disappeared in 2007 while in Iran and was never prioritized in negotiations until it was too late.
And now, it’s happening again.
Mahmood Shah Habibi, a U.S. citizen, was captured by the Taliban and handed over to al-Qaeda by direct order of Sirajuddin Haqqani, the Taliban's Interior Minister. Habibi was charged by Haqqani with spying on the al-Qaeda leader Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was killed in a U.S. strike in Kabul in 2022. Habibi is currently being held in an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan. Both Haqqani and Taliban Supreme Leader Haibatullah Akhundzada receive regular updates on his detention from senior al-Qaeda commander Abu Ikhlas al-Masri, who is based in Afghanistan and personally monitors Habibi’s detention status.
This push to capture American hostages traces directly to the current leader of al-Qaeda, Hamza bin Laden—son of Osama—who urged the Taliban to seize U.S. citizens as bargaining chips to pressure Washington into releasing his father’s former interpreter, Mohammad Rahim al-Afghani, still held at Guantanamo Bay.
Despite the detention of Habibi on Afghan soil, the U.S. continues to hand over tens of millions of dollars every month in counterterrorism assistance to the same Taliban leadership responsible. At high-level meetings in Doha, Qatar, no one is even demanding answers about Habibi—let alone his return.
We may have lost Tice. We definitely lost Levinson. But we still have a chance to save Habibi—if the U.S. government chooses to act. That means halting funds, ending appeasement, and making the freedom of American citizens a non-negotiable red line in every engagement with the Taliban.
Stop rewarding regimes and terrorist networks that take Americans hostage. Put our own first—finally.