DAMASCUS — The mother of American journalist Austin Tice, who has been missing in Syria since 2012, said Monday during a visit to the Syrian capital that the incoming Trump administration has offered to help uncover long-awaited answers about the fate of her son.

Tice’s mother, Debra Tice, addressed reporters at a news conference in Damascus on her first visit to the capital in almost a decade, a visit made possible by the astonishing collapse of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime here last month.

“I have great hope that the Trump administration will sincerely engage in diligent work to bring Austin home,” Debra Tice said.

Trump’s “people have already reached out to me. I haven’t experienced that for the last four years,” she said, comments that implied that the incoming team appeared more proactive than the Biden administration when it came to her son’s case.

The mother’s visit to Syria included a meeting with the country’s interim leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, who was the commander of the Islamist militant group that led Assad’s ouster and who is formerly known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. The meeting was the latest leg in Debra Tice’s long quest to learn the fate of her son, a Marine veteran and freelance journalist who had worked from Syria for The Washington Post.

Austin Tice was abducted from a checkpoint outside Damascus in August 2012. A video that surfaced weeks later showed him blindfolded and in the custody of armed men. The U.S. government, based on an intelligence analysis, deemed that video to be staged by the Syrian regime in an effort to make it appear that Islamist militants had seized him.

The journalist is one of more than 100,000 people that monitoring groups say went missing under Assad’s regime, most of whom are believed to have died inside jails run by the country’s military or intelligence services. In the month since the regime’s fall, families of the forcibly disappeared have traveled from prison to prison, seeking documents or eyewitness testimony that can shed light on what happened to their loved ones.

Successive American administrations have made attempts to speak with Syrian officials about Austin Tice but never achieved meaningful cooperation: The regime steadfastly refused to acknowledge that it held him. Leads about his whereabouts have gone nowhere or run dry.

Other wrongfully detained Americans in Syria have been brought home, but Austin Tice’s case has remained unresolved.

At a news conference in Washington in December, Debra Tice said she had “no doubt” that Austin was alive and well, citing a “significant” source she did not name. Her remarks came after the Tice family met with Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan and State Department officials in Washington.

“We have from a significant source that has already been vetted all over our government: Austin Tice is alive. Austin Tice [is being] treated well. And there is no doubt about that,” she said at the time.

U.S. officials, however, said privately that they did not have any information to corroborate that view and said many tips and leads over the years had not panned out. Often, current and former U.S. officials said, the sourcing of information on Austin Tice has been unreliable — hearsay or information passed along in the hope of receiving a reward.

At the news conference Monday in Damascus, Debra Tice said that as part of her search, she had visited two detention centers in the city in recent days, traveling a path well worn by countless other relatives of the disappeared since Assad was toppled and his security personnel vanished.

“I hardly even know what to say about this experience,” she said. “Horrible, awful, terrible nightmare.”

Nakashima reported from Washington.

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