Syria will help Washington find Americans who are missing, reported Agence France-Presse, quoted by BTA.
The government of President Ahmed al-Sharaa has agreed to help the United States find Americans whose traces in Syria are lost during the civil war, said the American envoy for Syria, Tom Barrack. Yesterday, he held a meeting with al-Sharaa, who was also on a visit there, in the Turkish metropolis of Istanbul.
Americans Austin Tice, Madge Kamalmaz and Kayla Mueller are missing in Syria.
Tice is a journalist working for Agence France-Presse, "Washington Post", CBS and other media. He was kidnapped in August 2012 by gunmen near the Syrian capital Damascus. No one has ever claimed responsibility for his abduction. Thais' mother met with Ash Sharaa in Damascus in January.
Kayla Muller is an aid worker with the Danish Refugee Council. She was kidnapped in Aleppo in August 2013. The Islamic State group said Muller was killed in Raqqa in 2015 during strikes by the anti-jihadist coalition. However, Trump said in 2019 that she was held captive and later killed by ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was himself killed in a US operation that same year. Mueller's body was never found.
Madj Kamalmaz, a Syrian-born American psychologist, was arrested at a checkpoint in 2017 and has been missing since. He was in Damascus on a private visit.
Trump has said that repatriating American citizens or paying respects to their remains is an absolute priority for the United States.
Al-Sharaa leads the organization "Hayat Tahrir al-Sham", a former Syrian branch of "Al-Qaeda" that is a rival to IS. "Hayat Tahrir al-Sham" was disbanded by Al-Sharaa after the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad.
According to a Syrian source, in addition to the names of the three Americans mentioned above, Washington has presented Damascus with a list of 11 names of people it wants to be found who have American citizenship.
At the same time, a Qatari mission has already begun searching for the remains of Americans killed by ISIS in northern Syria. On May 11, Qatari security forces announced that they had found the remains of 30 people kidnapped and killed by ISIS in Dabiq, north of Aleppo.
In 2022, an ISIS member – El Shafiq al-Sheikh was sentenced to life in prison in the United States for his role in the murders of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff.