By Simon Lewis
AQABA, Jordan (Reuters) – The United States is working to get an American citizen found on Thursday in Syria out of the country and bring him home, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in Jordan, where he held meetings to discuss the political transition of Syria.
In media reports, the man was identified as Travis Timmerman.
“In terms of 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 that Timmerman identified himself as an American from Missouri and that he was freed from a prison earlier in the week after Syrian rebel groups ousted the country’s longtime president Bashar al-Assad over the weekend.
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 the efforts to locate Austin Tice, another U.S. citizen who was abducted in Syria over a decade ago was still 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. He has tasked his team with doing whatever it takes to bring Tice home, according to people familiar with the directive.
(Reporting by Simon Lewis in Aqaba and Humeyra Pamuk and Daphne Psaledakis in Washington)
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