The United States is working to bring home a US citizen found in Syria, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said.
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 lightning offensive by armed opposition groups.
“We’re working to bring him home,” Blinken said during a visit to neighbouring Jordan on Thursday to discuss the situation in Syria, adding that he couldn’t provide “any details on exactly what’s going to happen”.
Timmerman, a 29-year-old from the US state of Missouri, told reporters that he was detained after crossing into 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 what appeared to be a private house. A group of men said that he was being treated well and would be safely returned home.
“It was OK. I was fed. I was watered. The one difficulty was that I couldn’t go to the bathroom when I wanted to,” Timmerman said later in an interview with the Al Arabiya television network, adding that he was only allowed to go three times a day.
“I was not beaten and the guards treated me decently,” Timmerman said.
Missouri law enforcement had reported Timmerman missing in Hungary earlier this year, and in August, Hungarian police put out a missing persons announcement saying he was last seen at a church in Budapest.
His release comes as Syrians have poured into the country’s notorious prisons in search of loved ones who went missing during al-Assad’s crackdown on human rights activists, opposition groups and other perceived opponents.
Rights groups and the United Nations have said tens of thousands of Syrian civilians were arbitrarily detained or disappeared by the Syrian government since 2011, when a popular uprising against al-Assad’s rule began.
The detention centres were rife with mass killings, torture and other cruel and inhuman treatment, and Amnesty International dubbed one notorious facility near the capital Damascus, Sednaya, a “human slaughterhouse”.
As video emerged online of Timmerman on Thursday, he was initially mistaken by some for Austin Tice, an American journalist who went missing after he was abducted 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 was ready to cooperate with Washington to look for Americans disappeared under al-Assad.
In 2022, US President Joe Biden accused the Syrian government of holding Tice.
Since al-Assad’s ouster, Biden has said his administration believes Tice was alive and was committed to bringing him home.
“We think we can get him back, but we have no direct evidence of that yet. And Assad should be held accountable,” the president said on Sunday. “We have to identify where he is.”
