WASHINGTON – The U.S. military has transported out of Syria an American who had disappeared seven months ago into former President Bashar Assad’s notorious prison system and was among the thousands released this week by rebels, U.S. officials said Friday.
Travis Timmerman, 29, was flown to Jordan on a U.S. military helicopter, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing operation.
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It’s unclear where Timmerman may go next. He thanked his rescuers for freeing him but has told American officials that he would like to stay in the region, according to another person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to comment publicly.
Timmerman was detained after he crossed into Syria while on a Christian pilgrimage from a mountain along the eastern Lebanese town of Zahle in June.
He told The Associated Press in an interview earlier Friday that he was not ill-treated while in Palestine Branch, a notorious detention facility operated by Syrian intelligence.
In his prison cell, Timmerman said, he had a mattress, a plastic drinking container and two others for waste. He said the Friday calls to prayers helped keep track of days.
Timmerman said he was released Monday morning alongside a young Syrian man and 70 female prisoners, some of whom had their children with them, after rebels seized control of Damascus and forced Assad from power in a dramatic upheaval.
He said he was freed by “the liberators who came into the prison and knocked the door down (of his cell) with a hammer.” He had been held separately from Syrian and other Arab prisoners and said he didn’t know of any other Americans held in the facility.
Timmerman is from Urbana, Missouri, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of Springfield in the southwestern part of the state. He earned a finance degree from Missouri State University in 2017.
His mother, Stacey Gardiner, said she was told that he was being taken to a military base in Jordan. The family still had not spoken to him.
Mouaz Moustafa, a U.S.-based Syrian opposition activist who worked with rebels to arrange Timmerman’s transfer back to safety, tweeted a photo of the freed American standing next to a man in U.S. military uniform in the flat desert of the region.
“Safe and sound and back in American hands,” Moustafa wrote.
U.S. officials, meanwhile, are continuing their search for Austin Tice, an American journalist who disappeared 12 years ago near Damascus.
Nizar Zakka, president of the U.S.-based Hostage Aid Worldwide that was commissioned by Tice's family to search for him, said he called Tice’s mother and sister after receiving a tip Thursday from a Syrian near where Timmerman was found. The caller thought the foreigner was Tice.
“We asked them for videos, we ask them for voice (recordings) to make sure,” Zakka said. “We had the feeling from the minute, especially from the age, that it’s not correct. But we sent it to the mom. It was 3 a.m. (in the U.S.), and we woke the sister, and she said to me one thing. She said that definitely it’s not Austin.”
In the search for Tice, Zakka said he had visited detention centers and the houses of prominent figures in Assad’s circle, but the search had so far not produced results.
The three possible scenarios, Zakka said, are that “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 escaping 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 U.S. for announcing a $10 million reward for information leading to Tice, saying that it had led to a flood of false tips and caused confusion.
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AP writers Abby Sewell in Damascus, Eric Tucker in Washington, Matthew Lee in Aqaba, Jordan, and Nick Ingram in Urbana, Missouri, contributed to this report.