By Simon Lewis and Eric Cox
AQABA, Jordan (Reuters) -The United States is working to bring home an American citizen found on Thursday in Syria, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in Jordan, where he held meetings to discuss the political transition in Syria.
In media reports, the man was identified as Travis Timmerman.
“In terms of (the) American citizen who was found just today, I can’t give you any details on exactly what’s going to happen, except to say that we’re working to bring him home, to bring him out of Syria,” Blinken told reporters in Aqaba.
“But for privacy reasons, I can’t share any more details about this,” Blinken added.
CBS News reported Timmerman identified himself as an American from Missouri and that he was freed from prison earlier in the week after Syrian rebel groups ousted the country’s longtime President Bashar al-Assad over the weekend.
Timmerman’s mother, Stacey Collins, told Reuters she thought her son was dead after being missing for seven months.
“I really truly did. But I didn’t want to give up. I didn’t want to give up on my son,” Collins said.
Collins said was excited to hear about her son, particularly since his father had taken ill.
Timmerman told CBS he had been detained in prison after entering Syria without permission seven months ago for Christian “spiritual purposes”.
The U.S. had no prior indication the man was in Syria, White House spokesperson John Kirby said in a briefing. “We are just getting word of this, and we’re trying to confirm his identity at this point, so the State Department is working hard on that right now.”
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.
Blinken added that efforts to locate Austin Tice, another U.S. citizen who was abducted in Syria over a decade ago were continuing.
“No update on Austin Tice, except to say that every single day, we are working to find him and to bring him home, making sure that the word is out to everyone that this is a priority for the United States,” Blinken said.
Tice, a former U.S. Marine and a freelance journalist, was 31 when he was kidnapped in August 2012 while reporting in Damascus.
President Joe Biden said on Sunday the U.S. government believes Tice is alive.
When asked about reports Tice might be in Iran, Kirby said Washington has ways of being in touch with interlocutors around the world. “It’s a full-court press to see what we can do to find out more about Austin Tice, and that includes having a lot of conversations with a lot of different folks,” he added.
(Reporting by Simon Lewis in Aqaba and Humeyra Pamuk, Andrea Shalal and Daphne Psaledakis in Washington; Editing by Rod Nickel and Lincoln Feast.)
