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Travis Timmerman, the American who said he was released from a Syrian prison in the middle of fall of ousted President Bashar al-AssadThe U.S. military has flown out of the country, a U.S. defense official confirmed to CBS News on Friday.
Timmerman, 29, who disappeared from Syria’s notorious prison system about seven months ago, was taken to the US military base in Al Tanf and then flown out of Syria by helicopter and handed over to the State Department in united states A second defense official told CBS News that he was flown to Jordan.
Mouaz Moustafa, director of the Washington, DC-based Syrian Emergency Task Force, which worked with the rebels to arrange Timmerman’s transfer to safety, shared a photo of Timmerman’s handover to US forces.
“Pete Timmerman, aka Travis, is safe and sound and back in American hands, thanks to the incredible team at (the Syria Emergency Task Force) for making this possible!” Moustafa wrote in a post on X.
Timmerman, who is from Missouri, told CBS News Senior Correspondent Elizabeth Palmer on Thursday that he was released from prison earlier in the week after rebels toppled the Assad government. He said two men armed with AK-47s broke down the door of his prison on Monday with a hammer.
“My door was broken in, it woke me up,” Timmerman said. “I thought the guards were still there, so I thought the war might have been more active than it ended up being. . . . Once we got out, there was no resistance, no real fighting.”
Timmerman said he had gone to Syria for Christian “spiritual purposes” and that his experience in prison “wasn’t bad at all.” He said he was detained when he entered Syria without permission seven months ago after spending a month in neighboring Lebanon.
“I was never beaten. The only really bad part was that I couldn’t go to the bathroom when I wanted to. They only let me out three times a day to go to the bathroom,” she said.
Timmerman said he left the jail with a large group and began to leave.
The 29-year-old’s family told CBS News foreign correspondent Ian Lee they are very happy he is alive and well.
“It’s hard not to think negative thoughts at the time. We were thinking it was going to be the worst outcome for us,” Timmerman’s cousin Mandy Pentridge said.
Timmerman is from Urbana, Missouri, about 50 miles north of Springfield in the southwestern part of the state. He earned a bachelor’s degree in finance from Missouri State University in 2017, the Associated Press reported.
contributed to this report.
