Travis Timmerman, the American who said he was freed from a Syrian prison amid the downfall of ousted President Bashar al-Assad‘s dictatorship, was taken out of the country by the U.S. military, a U.S. defense official confirmed to CBS News on Friday.
Timmerman, 29, who disappeared into Syria’s notorious prison system about seven months ago, was taken to the Al Tanf U.S. military base and then flown out of Syria via helicopter and handed over to the U.S. State Department. A second defense official told CBS News he was flown to Jordan.
Mouaz Moustafa, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Syrian Emergency Task Force who worked with rebels to arrange Timmerman’s transfer back to safety, shared a photo of the handoff of Timmerman to U.S. forces.
“Pete Timmerman AKA Travis is safe and sound and back in American hands thank you to the amazing team at (the Syrian Emergency Task Force) for making this happen!” Moustafa wrote in a post on X.
Timmerman, who is from Missouri, told CBS News senior foreign correspondent Elizabeth Palmer on Thursday that he was freed from prison earlier in the week after rebels overthrew Assad’s government. He said two men armed with AK-47s broke his prison door down Monday with a hammer.
“My door was busted down, it woke me up,” Timmerman said. “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.”
Timmerman said he had gone to Syria for Christian “spiritual purposes” and that his experience in prison “wasn’t too bad.” He said he was detained upon entering 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. I was only let out three times a day to go to the bathroom,” he said.
Timmerman said he left the prison with a large group and started walking away.
The 29-year-old’s family told CBS News foreign correspondent Ian Lee they are overjoyed that he is alive and well.
“It’s hard not to think of negative thoughts at that time. We were kind of 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 finance degree from Missouri State University in 2017, the Associated Press reported.
Haley Ott and
contributed to this report.