An American man who said he illegally entered Syria on foot from Lebanon as part of a Christian pilgrimage and then spent about seven months in a Damascus prison, spoke to members of the media on Thursday.
Travis Timmerman, 29, was found by residents this week wandering barefoot in a suburb south of Syria’s capital.
The Missouri man, who was reported missing by Hungarian police in an alert published in June, appears to have been freed along with thousands of detainees who have been emerging from Syria’s jails after the toppling of the country’s longtime dictator, President Bashar Assad, this month.
“My door was busted down. It woke me up,” Timmerman told CBS News, describing how he was freed.
“I thought the guards were still there, so I thought the warfare could have been more active than it ended up being. … Once we got out, there was no resistance; there was no real fighting.”
It wasn’t immediately clear why Timmerman initially spent time in Hungary. Missouri Highway Patrol said he disappeared from Budapest on May 28. Local Syrian residents and journalists initially − mistakenly, as it turned out − believed Timmerman was Austin Tice, an American journalist who vanished in Syria more than a decade ago while reporting on the country’s civil war. Over the past few days, members of Tice’s family have told reporters they are confident their son was still alive, but there had been no public sightings of him.
A Syrian dictator’s toppling:It raises new hopes for missing American journalist Austin Tice
The end of Assad’s regime has been chaotic.
A rebel group called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, known as HTS, which led the assault that toppled Assad, was formed as an offshoot of al-Qaida. HTS has claimed it will now rule on behalf of all Syrians, but it faces a multitude of challenges, including consolidating its control over a patchwork of rebel forces, demonstrating it is capable of political inclusivity, and convincing the international community it intends to uphold the rule of law and human rights.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Jordan on Thursday as part of a Mideast trip to promote an “inclusive, Syrian-led” government transition in Damascus in the wake of Assad’s overthrow. Blinken said the U.S. hopes to ensure Syria is not “used as a base for terrorism” and does not pose a threat to its neighbors.
While in the region, Blinken will also discuss a cease-fire in Gaza between Israel and the militant group Hamas, U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Wednesday. The trip is Blinken’s 12th to the region since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, a move that caused Israel to launch a military campaign in Gaza.
Timmerman said he was stopped by Syrian officials earlier this year after crossing into the country on foot.
He told NBC News he had “been reading the Scripture a lot” before deciding to cross the mountains from Lebanon into Syria. He also said his time in prison in Syria “wasn’t too bad.”
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“I was never beaten. The only really bad part was that I couldn’t go to the bathroom when I wanted to. I was only let out three times a day to go to the bathroom.”
Timmerman’s experience is likely not typical. The Syrian state under Assad spent years torturing and slaughtering political prisoners and perceived opponents.
This article was updated to include video.
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