The US military has transported out of Syria an American who went missing seven months ago in former President Bashar Assad’s notorious prison system and was one of thousands released this week by rebels, US officials said Friday.
According to two US officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a current operation, a US military helicopter flew Travis Timmerman, 29, to Jordan.
It’s unclear where Timmerman will go next. He thanked his rescuers for his release, but he has told American officials that he wants to stay in the region, according to another person familiar with the situation who was not authorized to speak publicly.
After Timmerman crossed into Syria on a Christian pilgrimage from a mountain near Zahle in eastern Lebanon, authorities detained him in June.
He asserted in an interview with The Associated Press earlier Friday that Syrian intelligence-run Palestine Branch, a notorious detention facility, did not mistreat him.
Timmerman stated that in his prison cell, he had a mattress, a plastic drinking container, and two waste containers. He said the Friday prayer calls helped him keep track of the days.
Timmerman reported that after rebels took control of Damascus and deposed Assad in a dramatic upheaval, they released him Monday morning along with a young Syrian man and 70 female prisoners, some of whom had children with them.
“The liberators who came into the prison and knocked the door down (of his cell) with a hammer” set him free, he claimed. The facility held him separately from Syrian and other Arab prisoners, and he claimed to be unaware of any other Americans detained there.
Timmerman is from Urbana, Missouri, which is approximately 50 miles (80 kilometres) north of Springfield in the state’s southwestern region. He received a finance degree from Missouri State University in 2017.
Stacey Gardiner, his mother, confirmed that she received information about his transfer to a military base in Jordan. The family still hadn’t spoken to him.
Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian opposition activist based in the United States who worked with rebels to arrange Timmerman’s return to safety, tweeted a photo of the freed American standing next to a man dressed in a US military uniform in the region’s flat desert.
“Safe and sound, and back in American hands,” Moustafa stated.
Meanwhile, US officials are searching for Austin Tice, an American journalist who went missing near Damascus 12 years ago.
Nizar Zakka, president of Hostage Aid Worldwide, the US-based organization tasked by Tice’s family with finding him, said he called Tice’s mother and sister after receiving a tip from a Syrian near where Timmerman was discovered Thursday. The caller believed the foreigner was Tice.
“We asked them for videos; we asked them for voice (recordings) to make sure,” Zakka told me. “We felt from the beginning, especially considering the child’s age, that the information was incorrect.” However, we decided to forward the information to the mother.
It was 3 a.m. (in the United States), and we woke the sister, who told me one thing. She said, “It’s definitely not Austin.”
In his search for Tice, Zakka stated that he had visited detention facilities and the homes of prominent figures in Assad’s circle, but that the search had yielded no results.
Zakka described three possible scenarios: “We will find him somewhere in Damascus, in the jail that he was left in or in the house, in the safe house where he is”; that a high-ranking member of Assad’s circle took Tice along while fleeing the country “as a security for his life”; or that Tice’s captors killed him and other prisoners to erase evidence of their crimes.
He criticized the United States for announcing a $10 million reward for information leading to TICE, claiming that it resulted in a flood of false tips and confusion.
