Joshua Boyle’s wife says captivity ‘intolerable’ for her children
OTTAWA — An American woman who endured five years of captivity in Afghanistan said she and her Canadian husband resisted their captors and did the best they could to raise young children in brutal conditions, using bottle caps and cardboard as toys and teaching their eldest son geography and astronomy.
“Obviously it saddened me to see how they were growing up, what they were growing up knowing. But I had to do everything I could do help them,” Caitlan Coleman Boyle told ABC News in an interview broadcast Monday.
Pakistani troops rescued Coleman Boyle, her husband, Joshua Boyle, and their three children on Oct. 11, five years after the couple was abducted in Afghanistan on a backpacking trip. The children were born while the family was being held by the Taliban-linked Haqqani network.
Coleman Boyle, who is from Stewartstown, Pa., said their captors beat their eldest son, Najaeshi, with a stick, and he knew the family was in mortal danger.