Blinken says Washington is working to bring home a US citizen found in Syria. syrian war news
Travis Timmerman says he was detained after traveling to Syria on a Christian pilgrimage earlier this year.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said the United States is working to bring home an American citizen found in Syria.
Travis Timmerman appears to have been among thousands of people released from the country’s notorious prisons after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was ousted this week in a massive offensive by armed opposition groups.
“We are working to bring him home,” Blinken said during a visit to neighboring Jordan on Thursday to discuss the situation in Syria. He said he could not give any details about “what exactly is going to happen”.
Timmerman, 29, from the US state of Missouri, told reporters he was detained after traveling to Syria on foot during a Christian pilgrimage seven months ago.
Video footage released online on Thursday showed him lying on a mattress under a blanket in a private home. A group of men said they were being treated well and would return home safely.
“It was OK. I was fed. I was given water. The one difficulty was that I couldn’t go to the bathroom when I wanted to,” Timmerman later said in an interview with the Al Arabiya television network. That he was allowed to go only three times a day.
“I wasn’t beaten and the guards treated me well,” Timmerman said.
Missouri law enforcement reported Timerman missing in Hungary earlier this year, and in August, Hungarian police declared a missing person missing, saying he was last seen in a church in Budapest.
Their release comes as Syrians flock to the country’s notorious prisons in search of loved ones missing during al-Assad’s crackdown on human rights activists, opposition groups and other alleged opponents.
Rights groups and the United Nations have said that since 2011, when a popular uprising against al-Assad’s regime began, thousands of Syrian civilians have been arbitrarily detained or disappeared by the Syrian government.
Detention centers were rife with mass killings, torture and other cruel and inhumane treatment, and Amnesty International labeled one notorious facility near the capital, Sednaya, at Sednaya, a “human slaughterhouse”.
As Timerman’s video surfaced online on Thursday, some people initially mistook him for Austin Tice, the American journalist who went missing after being kidnapped in Syria 12 years ago.
Syria’s new transitional government said in a statement on Telegram that the search for Tice was ongoing and that it stood ready to cooperate with Washington to search for Americans missing under al-Assad.
In 2022, US President Joe Biden accused the Syrian government of capturing Tice.
Since al-Assad’s ouster, Biden has said his administration believed Tice was alive and was committed to bringing him home.
“We think we can bring him back, but we don’t have any direct proof of that yet. And Assad must be held accountable,” the president said Sunday. “We have to identify where he is.”
