WASHINGTON (Reuters) -American citizen Travis Timmerman has been flown out of Syria, where he was imprisoned before being released by rebels this week, U.S. officials 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 U.S. 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 rebel groups ousted the country’s longtime President Bashar al-Assad.
The White House on Thursday said that the United States had no prior indication that the American was in Syria.
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 Assad regime is estimated to have held tens of thousands of detainees.
Austin Tice, another U.S. citizen who was abducted in Syria over a decade ago, has still not been found.
Tice, a former U.S. Marine and freelance journalist, was 31 when he was kidnapped in August 2012 while reporting in Damascus.
(Reporting by Idrees Ali and Simon Lewis; Writing by Jasper Ward; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Mark Porter)
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