US citizen freed from Syrian prison identified as Travis Timmerman, not Austin Tice
A US citizen freed from a Syrian prison was identified as Travis Timmerman after a video of him circulated online and sparked initial speculation that he was Austin Tice, an American journalist believed to have been imprisoned for over a decade by the toppled government of Bashar al-Assad.
After he was found in a jail cell in a prison in Dhiyabia this week, Timmerman, 29, said he was imprisoned for seven months after crossing into Syria from Lebanon.
He said he was a Christian pilgrim and had been treated well during his seven months in prison.
Timmerman said he found out the news about Assad's ousting on Monday, when two men with hammers broke down the door to his cell, waking him up.
"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," he said.
The initial video showing Timmerman in his cell circulated on social media this week, with some saying it was Tice.
Read More »Tice, a former US Marine, was a freelance photojournalist working for Agence France-Presse, McClatchy News, The Washington Post, CBS and other news organisations when he disappeared after being detained at a checkpoint near Damascus on 14 August 2012.
Assad's government had denied any knowledge of Tice's whereabouts, but US officials have said throughout the past decade that they believe the American is alive and in Syria.
Even though Tice's whereabouts continue to be unknown, the Biden administration has recently reiterated that they believe he is alive, and Tice's family said they are hopeful for his safe return to the US.
A spokesperson for the new leadership in Syria said that they hold the former Assad government responsible for Tice's treatment, adding that Syrian authorities are currently still searching for the American throughout the country's prisons.
“We hold Bashar al-Assad and his criminal regime accountable for the consequences of Austin’s disappearance and the pain inflicted on his mother - pain, tears, and separation," Obaida al-Arnaot, official spokesperson and head of the political affairs department of Syria’s interim government, told NBC News in an interview Wednesday.
"We tried as much as possible to find information about Austin and return him to his mother, but we have not reached any result," he said.
The search for Tice comes after the rapid fall of the Assad government, sparked by a renewed rebel offensive led by Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham in late November. Within 11 days, the rebels entered Damascus, and Assad and his family fled the country, seeking asylum in Moscow.
Since then, thousands of people - Syrians and foreigners alike - have been freed from Syria's prisons across the country, and videos have revealed the horrific conditions of these prisons under the Assad government.
