Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs John Kirby said during a regular media briefing on Wednesday that Snell was being held at a prison in Turkey’s southern Hatay Province, which sits along the Syrian border.
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Snell has been placed at a prison facility in the southern Turkish province of Hatay and US consular officials visited her last Friday, Aug. 26, State Department spokesman John Kirby said.
The U.S. supports Kurdish fighters battling the terrorist group in northern Iraq and Syria, though Turkey is waging its own battle with Kurdish separatists who it calls “terrorists”. But I can’t speak to her reasons for being in Syria, for travelling there.
Turkish authorities told their news agency Anadolu that she was crossing the border illegally, with speculation that she was a spy.
Lindsey Snell, a Florida native who has travelled to some of the most unsafe no-go areas in Syria in recent years, and who documented her own purported “arrest” by an al Qaeda affiliate (or former affiliate) there last month, was detained as she crossed back into Turkey on August 7, according to Turkish media.
Lindsey Snell a freelance reporter in the Middle East, is being held in jail by Turkish authorities.. “State Department officials have been in contact with Turkish government officials regarding this case”. The trial phase is ongoing. (And I bet ‘don’t give prisoners phones!’ will make it into the new Jabhat Fateh al Sham employee handbook.) It’s a insane story. The woman was earlier kidnapped by militants and posted on her Facebook account that she had escaped from their captivity on 5 August. “I can’t wait to share the details”.
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According to her Facebook page, Snell is a native of Daytona, Florida, and had been living in Istanbul. Her LinkedIn profile says that she has been working as senior foreign correspondent for Vocativ since March 2014 and she previously worked for Vice, ABC News and National Geographic.
