A kidnapped Canadian and his American wife have appeared in a new video pleading for their lives.

Joshua Boyle and Caitlan Coleman were kidnapped by the Taliban in 2012 while on a backpacking trip in the mountains of Afghanistan.

In the two-minute, 32-second video shared by SITE Intelligence group Boyle, 33, and Coleman, 31, say that if the Afghan government doesn’t stop executing Taliban prisoners, their captors will kill them and other prisoners.

“They will execute us, women and children included, if the policies of the Afghan government are not overturned either by the Afghan government or by Canada somehow, or United States,” Boyle says in the video.

He appears wan, with a long, unkempt beard and Coleman is seen dressed in black clothing covering everything but her face. They each speak slowly, in turn, apparently reading from a script held off camera.

“Our captors are terrified at the thought of their own mortality approaching and are saying that they will take reprisals on our family,” Boyle says in the video.

In May, the Afghan government hanged six inmates linked to the Taliban.

Coleman was pregnant when the couple was kidnapped in 2012. In November her parents received a letter telling of how she’d given birth to a second child while being held in captivity. The video is the first time she or Boyle have been seen in three years. In 2013, the couple appeared in two videos asking the U.S. government to free them from the Taliban.

Global Affairs spokesman Michael O’Shaughnessy said in an emailed statement that the department is aware of the video.

“The Government of Canada will not comment or release any information which may compromise or risk endangering the safety of Canadian citizens abroad,” O’Shaughnessy’s email read.

Before their kidnapping, Boyle and Coleman had recently finished a six-month stint travelling across Central America, often visiting remote communities and staying with local families. They were planning another trip backpacking across Russia and Central Asia. Their last communication before being seized was from a town near Kabul that Boyle described to his family as an “unsafe” part of Afghanistan.

Boyle was once married to Omar Khadr’s sister, Zaynab, who spoke out against her brother’s detention in Guantanamo Bay.

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U.S. officials said, according to The Associated Press, that Boyle’s marriage to Khadr was not connected to his and Coleman’s kidnapping.

With files from The Canadian Press