Another foreign journalist is missing in Syria, this time it's Austin Tice, an American who hasn't been heard from in more than a week, though we're hopeful his silence just signals a lapse in communication and not something worse. McClatchy's Hannah Allam reported on Thursday that the 31-year-old Tice, the newspaper company's freelance correspondent, hadn't been heard from since he exchanged email with a colleague more than a week ago, and The Washington Post, for which he also wrote, reported that his family hadn't heard from him in about the same timeframe.

McClatchy's Allam wrote that "his subsequent silence didn’t raise immediate alarm because he’d planned to leave that week, on a journey to the border that often takes days because of the fighting en route." But in a week that has already seen one foreign journalist kill and two others disappear, Tice's silence has started feeling ominous enough that McClatchy, Tice's family, and The Post are appealing to the public for help finding him (please contact McClatchy's chief of correspondents Mark Seibel if you know anything, by the way). Tice is a former Marine officer and Georgetown law student who went to Syria this summer to start a career as a journalist. His last tweet, from August 11, describes a birthday party with members of the Free Syrian Army. But the most moving detail from his digital life, which The Post shared online with permission from Tice's family, is a post on Facebook pleading with his contacts to "please quit telling me to be safe." In it, he wrote, "we’ve lost the sense that there actually are things out there worth dying for."

[Photo via Linkedin]

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Adam Martin