The Road to Damascus

[Draggingtree]

The Road to Damascus

 

In 2012 Houston native Austin Tice heeded a calling to become a journalist in war-ravaged Syria. His photographs, stories, and tweets shed new light on the conflict—until one day they stopped.

 

October 2015 By Sonia Smith 6 Comments

Before he ever considered traveling to Syria, before he saw his byline in the Washington Post, and before he made worldwide news, Austin Tice had a revelation in the desert. At 29, he had insatiable curiosity and a surfeit of charisma, and though he generally wasn’t one to entertain visions, he’d been thinking a lot about his future. It was 2011, and he was three months into his deployment at Camp Leatherneck, in southern Afghanistan, with his fellow Marines. Despite being in a war zone, he was restless. The Arab Spring, the wave of democratic uprisings sweeping through Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, had been making headlines; the Islamic world was changing fast, and he felt desperately removed from the action. “So often I feel like I was born in the wrong age, or at least on the wrong continent,” he wrote on Facebook that July. But then, as he spent his downtime between missions gazing at photos of protesters in the streets of the Libyan capital and reading tweets about rebels clashing with forces loyal to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, an idea came to him.

http://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/the-road-to-damascus/