US flies freed American Travis Timmerman out of Syria

The US military has flown American citizen Travis Timmerman out of Syria, where has was imprisoned before being released by opposition forces this week, a US official said on Friday.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Timmerman had been transferred to Jordan and was currently with State Department officials.

A second official said that Timmerman had been handed to US troops at Tanf garrison, which is near the intersection of the borders of Syria, Iraq and Jordan, and was flown out from there.

Timmerman went missing in June, according to his parents. He was freed from prison earlier in the week after Syrian opposition groups ousted the country’s longtime President Bashar al-Assad.

The White House on Thursday said that the US had no prior indication the man was in Syria.

Al-Assad fled to Russia after a 13-year civil war and more than five decades of his family’s autocratic rule, during which Syria ran one of the most oppressive police states in the Middle East.

Following his ouster, Syrians flocked to the infamous prisons where the al-Assad regime is estimated to have held tens of thousands of detainees.

Austin Tice, another US citizen who was abducted in Syria over a decade ago, has still not been found.

Tice, a former US Marine and a freelance journalist, was 31 when he was kidnapped in August 2012 while reporting in Damascus.