A U.S. official, speaking anonymously, confirmed that an American citizen held captive in a Syrian prison for seven months was extracted from the country via U.S. military helicopter.

Travis Timmerman, one of many prisoners freed by rebel forces over the weekend, stated that he was detained after illegally entering Syria during a Christian pilgrimage seven months prior.

He recounted to the Associated Press his release alongside a man and approximately 70 women, some with children, by the “liberators.”

Timmerman reported relatively humane treatment at the infamous Syrian intelligence facility, Palestine Branch.

However, he revealed to Al-Arabiya TV that he endured daily exposure to the torture of other inmates.

“It was OK. I was fed. I was watered,” Timmerman said. “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.”

His cell confinement allowed for three daily bathroom breaks.

Following Assad’s ouster, he described rebels breaching his cell door with a hammer.

Timmerman first appeared in an online video released Thursday after rebel forces seized Damascus. The video, showing a bearded Timmerman under a blanket, indicated he was receiving adequate care and would be repatriated, according to the Associated Press.

Palestine Branch (Branch 235) comprises numerous buildings concealed behind high walls, as reported by The New York Times.

Human Rights Watch documented over a decade ago that prisoners endured torture, including electric shocks and beatings.

“The guards hung me by my wrists from the ceiling for eight days,” a former prisoner recounted to 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 succumbed to illness or starvation amid the dire conditions.

At Sednaya, another notorious Syrian prison, The Free Press, in collaboration with the Center for Peace Communications, uncovered accounts of torture and executions following Assad’s regime collapse.

“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 mass prisoner release, families have been actively searching for missing loved ones.

“We slept on top of each other,” a woman, who detailed her 2020 four-and-a-half-month imprisonment at Palestine Branch with numerous other women, told The New York Times. “They did not feed us, they beat us.”

‘ Stephen Sorace and