An American man who says he was held in Syria for seven months is speaking out after being freed from prison following the collapse of Bashar Assad’s regime.
The man, who has been identified as Travis Timmerman, spoke to reporters in the country on Thursday about how he first came to Syria and also described the conditions he was held in.
Timmerman told CBS News he was detained after entering Syria without authorization. He had previously spent a month in Lebanon.
In a video shared by Al Arabiya News, Timmerman said he came to Syria on a religious pilgrimage.
“I’m a Christian,” he said.
Timmerman added that he was treated “well” in prison.
“It was OK,” he said. “I was fed. I was watered.”
He said the main difficulty was being allowed to go to the bathroom just three times a day.
“Other than that, I was not beaten, and the guards treated me decently,” he said.
Timmerman told CBS he was freed from prison on Monday after two armed men broke down his prison door.
“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,” he added.
The rebel forces that overthrew Assad’s regime have begun to empty the country’s political prisons.
Videos circulating online earlier Thursday appeared to show Timmerman after he was found by rebel forces. Some mistakenly believed he was U.S. journalist Austin Tice.
Timmerman told Al Arabiya News he hadn’t heard of Tice’s case.
Tice was captured in a Damascus suburb in 2012 while reporting on the Syrian civil war. The U.S. has long believed Tice was detained by Assad’s regime despite its denials.
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The collapse of that regime following a surprise offensive has renewed hope that Tice will be found and returned home.
“We believe he’s alive,” President Joe Biden said of Tice over the weekend. “We think we can get him back, but we have no direct evidence of that yet.”
