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However, before his latest troubles became public, Boyle spent a fair amount of time speaking with media outlets including the Sun about his captivity in Afghanistan.

“My problem with the Haqqani Network pre-date my capture,” wrote Boyle, rejecting the idea that this terrorist group is made up of devout Islamists.

“It’s not about ideology for the HN, they’re just ghetto trash gangbangers, drug dealers, carjackers who realize they can throw on a black turban, memorise (sic) the Quran,” added Boyle.

“Abu Hajjar, the commander whom I speak of, only knew Surah al-Asr and Surah al-Kauthar, that’s a total of six sentences,” said Boyle, referring to sections of the Quran.

“They’re just religious hypocrites, criminal miscreants and warmongers,” he said of his disillusionment and disappointment with this terrorist cell.

Boyle told the Sun that HN tried to recruit him, and offered him a position within their organization – an invitation Boyle claims to have rejected.

“And that’s why I laughed and informed them I’d rather be beheaded than join their group, despite four repeated offers/demands that I had to join them … culminating in the death of my daughter.”

Boyle says that his wife was the victim of a forced abortion while in captivity, a war crime under international law, an allegation the Taliban denied in a rare public rebuttal to a western media news story.

“From that point forward, it was clear we were at war and there were no more attempts to recruit; I imagine a three-day prison uprising in which we gained control of a portion of the compound and held our own with knives against their Kalashnikovs probably enforced the idea that I wasn’t just being coy, I really was willing to kill them,” said Boyle.