Blinken says US working to bring home citizen found in Syrian regime prison
Missouri native Travis Timmerman, who traveled to Syria on Christian pilgrimage in June, says he wasn’t beaten during time in prison, but could hear guards hitting other inmates
The United States is working to bring home an American citizen found on Thursday in Syria, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that day in Jordan, where he held meetings to discuss the political transition in Syria.
In media reports, the man was identified as Travis Timmerman, 29.
“In terms of [the] American citizen who was found just today, I can’t give you any details on exactly what’s going to happen, except to say that we’re working to bring him home, to bring him out of Syria,” Blinken told reporters in Aqaba.
“But for privacy reasons, I can’t share any more details about this,” Blinken added.
CBS News reported Timmerman identified himself as an American from Missouri and that he was freed from prison earlier in the week after Syrian rebel groups ousted the country’s longtime President Bashar al-Assad over the weekend.
Timmerman’s mother, Stacey Collins, told Reuters she thought her son was dead after being missing for seven months.
A man identifying himself as an American from Missouri, Travis Timmerman, has been found in Syria after he said he was freed from a prison earlier in the week, when dictator Bashar al-Assad was forced from power.
Timmerman told @CBSLizpalmer that he had been trying to make his… pic.twitter.com/P9ybbxuwGg
— CBS Mornings (@CBSMornings) December 12, 2024
“I really truly did. But I didn’t want to give up. I didn’t want to give up on my son,” Collins said.
Collins said she was excited to hear about her son, particularly since his father had taken ill.
Timmerman told CBS he had been detained in prison after entering Syria without permission seven months ago for Christian “spiritual purposes.”
White House spokesperson John Kirby said in a briefing that the US had no prior indication that the man was in Syria. “We are just getting word of this, and we’re trying to confirm his identity at this point, so the State Department is working hard on that right now.”
Assad fled to Russia after a 13-year civil war and more than five decades of his family’s autocratic rule, during which Syria ran one of the most oppressive police states in the Middle East.
Following his ouster, Syrians flocked to the infamous prisons where the Assad regime is estimated to have held tens of thousands of detainees.
Speaking to AP on Thursday, Timmerman said he was released Monday morning alongside a young Syrian man and 70 female prisoners, some of whom had their children with them.
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.
“I was there seven months. There were women there up above me,” Timmerman said. He heard the women singing and teaching their children and could hear some of the men being beaten regularly. “I was never beaten,” he said.
He was detained after he crossed into Syria from a mountain along the eastern Lebanese town of Zahle in June. He was questioned for three and a half hours by interrogators who thought he must be a spy. In a brief second interview, they searched his mobile phone, and in the last interview, he started discussing his dreams with his captors.
He said their threat of using violence against him was “implicit” because he could hear daily beatings next door. But his captors let him use his mobile to call his family three weeks ago. At the time, Timmerman didn’t tell his family he was in Damascus, only that he was fine.
He said later in his detention, he could hear explosions — at a time when Israel was intensifying its strikes in Syria. Israel’s war with the Hezbollah militant group had intensified in September before a ceasefire was reached last month.
“I heard some explosives that shook the building,” he said.
In his prison cell, Timmerman said he had a mattress, a plastic drinking container, and two others for waste. He had three bathroom breaks and exercise breaks in the first half of his stay.
He said the Friday calls to prayers helped him keep track of days.
He said he gained weight at first because he ate unleavened bread, rice, and oats. Sometimes he would get a potato or a tomato — a treatment clearly reserved for non-Syrian prisoners, who often ended up emaciated or sick.
“It is a time of solace and you can meditate on your life,” he told AP. “It was good for me.”
Timmerman was disheveled, with a scraggly beard and long hair and nails. He said he had a good sleep and a meal on Thursday.
He said he planned to return to Damascus.
In describing his release from prison, Timmerman said the action outside his cell woke him up. Those who came to release him spoke to him in Arabic. “It was an excited scene. It was not clear if the guards who were there were still there,” Timmerman said. “I didn’t know if they were taking us out in the midst of a war zone … in hindsight, this shooting was not actual clashes.”
He said he was panicked for a moment. But he realized some of the gunfire was celebratory from blanks. One man was shooting from an AK-47. At one point, he went running back into the prison with two other prisoners. A fellow prisoner helped him out, holding his arm, and speaking Arabic to those around. They both accompanied a female prisoner to her home.
He spent two nights in Damascus, one in an abandoned apartment in the old town and another at a new friend’s house.
He then started walking toward Jordan, when a Syrian family found him barefoot on a main road in the countryside of Damascus early Thursday.
The Syrian family told AP that Timmerman appeared cold and hungry so they brought him back to their home.
“I fed him and called a doctor,” said Mosaed al-Rifai, the 68-year-old waste collector who first found Timmerman.
A few hours after al-Rifai discovered him, rebels arrived at the family’s house to pick him up, he said.
Mouaz Mostafa, the executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a US-based nonprofit group, who was in Damascus learned of Timmerman’s location, reached him, and contacted US authorities about him.
Timmerman is now recovering until the rebels can figure out how to hand him to US authorities, Moustafa said.
In Aqaba, Blinken added that efforts to locate Austin Tice, another US citizen who was abducted in Syria over a decade ago were continuing.
“No update on Austin Tice, except to say that every single day, we are working to find him and to bring him home, making sure that the word is out to everyone that this is a priority for the United States,” Blinken said.
Tice, a former US Marine and a freelance journalist, was 31 when he was kidnapped in August 2012 while reporting in Damascus.
US President Joe Biden said on Sunday that Washington believes Tice is alive.
When asked about reports Tice might be in Iran, Kirby said Washington has ways of being in touch with interlocutors around the world. “It’s a full-court press to see what we can do to find out more about Austin Tice, and that includes having a lot of conversations with a lot of different folks,” he added.
