American freed from Syrian prison after Assad's overthrow taken out of country by US military
An American who was released this week after being held in a Syrian prison for seven months has been flown out of the country on a U.S. military helicopter, according to a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Travis Timmerman, who was among thousands of prisoners freed by rebels who overthrew former President Bashar al-Assad over the weekend, said after his release that he had been on a Christian pilgrimage when he illegally crossed into the country seven months ago and was detained.
He told The Associated Press that, along with another Syrian man, the "liberators" freed him with around 70 women, some of whom were also being held with their children.
Timmerman said that he wasn’t treated badly while he was held in the infamous Syrian intelligence facility known as Palestine Branch.
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But he told the Al-Arabiya TV network that he could hear other men being tortured in the prison every day.
"It was OK. I was fed. I was watered," said Timmerman. "The one difficulty was that I couldn’t go to the bathroom when I wanted to. I was not beaten, and the guards treated me decently."
He was allowed out of his cell three times a day to go to the bathroom.
After Assad’s overthrow, he said the rebels came to the prison and "knocked the door down (of his cell) with a hammer."
Timmerman was first seen in video that emerged online Thursday after rebels seized Damascus, the country’s capital.
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In the video, a bearded Timmerman was lying on a mattress under a blanket in what appeared to be a private house. A group of men in the video said he was being treated well and would be safely returned home, The Associated Press reported.
Palestine Branch, also known as Branch 235, houses nearly a dozen buildings hidden behind high concrete walls, according to The New York Times.
Human Rights Watch reported more than a decade ago that prisoners there were subjected to torture, including electrocutions and beatings.
"The guards hung me by my wrists from the ceiling for eight days," a former prisoner told the organization in 2012. "After a few days of hanging, being denied sleep, it felt like my brain stopped working. I was imagining things. My feet got swollen on the third day. I felt pain that I have never felt in my entire life. It was excruciating. I screamed that I needed to go to a hospital, but the guards just laughed at me."
Many prisoners would also die of illnesses or starvation under the deplorable conditions.
At another notorious Syrian prison known as Sednaya, The Free Press, in collaboration with the Center for Peace Communications, also discovered testimonies of torture and executions while investigating it after the fall of Assad’s regime this week.
"They would call out names at dawn, strip the prisoners of their clothes, and take them away," a former inmate told The Free Press. "We knew from the sound of chains on the platforms that these were executions. Condemned prisoners wouldn’t be fed for three days prior. Once a month, they would search us. During one such search, an officer declared, ‘We’re not here to inspect; we’re here to kill.’"
Since the thousands of prisoners were released, loved ones have been searching for signs of those who went missing in the barbaric prisons.
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"We slept on top of each other," one woman, who said she had been held at Palestine Branch for four and a half months in 2020 along with dozens of other women, told The New York Times. "They did not feed us, they beat us."
Fox News' Stephen Sorace and The Associated Press contributed to this report.