Donald Trump says release of Canadian, his US wife and their three children shows countries are ‘starting to respect’ US again

Five years after they were seized by an extremist network in the mountains of Afghanistan, a US woman, her Canadian husband and their children – all three born in captivity – have left Pakistan following their dramatic rescue, officials say.

The two Pakistani security officials said Caitlan Coleman of Stewartstown, Pennsylvania, her husband, Joshua Boyle, and their three children had left by plane from Islamabad on Friday.

Canadian American family rescued after five years as captives in Afghanistan Read more

The pair were abducted five years ago and held by the Haqqani network, which has ties to the Taliban. The operation to free the family, which came after years of US pressure on Pakistan for assistance, unfolded quickly and ended with what some described as a dangerous raid, a shootout and a captor’s final, terrifying threat to “kill the hostage”. Boyle suffered only a shrapnel wound, his family said.

US officials did not confirm the details.

“Today they are free,” the US president, Donald Trump, said in a statement on Thursday, crediting the US–Pakistani partnership for securing the release. Trump later praised Pakistan for its willingness to “do more to provide security in the region” and said the release suggested other “countries are starting to respect the United States of America once again”.

The couple were kidnapped in October 2012 while on a backpacking trip that took them to Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and then to Afghanistan. Coleman was several months pregnant at the time.

The Pakistani military said the family had been freed in “an intelligence-based operation by Pakistan troops” after they had crossed the border from Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s high commissioner to Canada, Tariq Azim Khan, said: “We know there was a shootout and Pakistan commandos carried out an attack and rescued the hostages.”



A US military official said a hostage team had flown to Pakistan on Wednesday, prepared to fly the family out. The team did a preliminary health assessment and had a transport plane ready to go. But some time after daybreak on Thursday, as the family members were walking to the plane, Boyle said he did not want to board.

Boyle’s father said his son did not want to board the plane because it was headed to Bagram airbase and the family wanted to return directly to North America. Another US official said Boyle was nervous about being in “custody” given his family ties.

He was once married to Zaynab Khadr, the older sister of the former Guantánamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr and the daughter of a senior al-Qaida financier. Her father, the late Ahmed Said Khadr, and the family stayed with Osama bin Laden briefly when Omar Khadr was a boy.

The Canadian-born Omar Khadr was 15 when he was captured by US troops following a gun battle and was taken to the US detention centre at Guantánamo Bay. Officials had discounted any link between that background and Boyle’s capture, with one official describing it in 2014 as a “horrible coincidence”.

The US justice department said neither Boyle nor Coleman was wanted for any federal crime.

The couple told US officials and their families they wanted to fly commercially to Canada.

Boyle’s father called the rescue a “miracle”. Coleman’s parents, Jim and Lyn Coleman, meanwhile, posted a statement on the door of their Pennsylvania home expressing joy. Lyn Coleman told ABC News: “I am in a state of euphoria, stunned and overjoyed.”

The developments came rapidly on Wednesday afternoon – nearly five years to the day after Coleman and Boyle lost touch with their families while travelling in a mountainous region near the Afghan capital, Kabul.

Coleman’s parents last had a conversation with their son-in-law on 8 October 2012, via an email sent from an internet cafe he had described as being in an “unsafe” part of Afghanistan. From then on, there were only desperate hostage videos released by their captors and hand-scrawled letters mailed home.

“I pray to hear from you again, to hear how everybody is doing,” read one letter the parents shared with the online Circa News service in July 2016, in which Coleman revealed she had given birth to a second child in captivity. It is unclear whether they knew she had a third.

Boyle’s parents say their son told them in a letter that he and his wife pretended to the children that their signs of captivity were part of a game being played with guards.

US officials call the Haqqani group a terrorist organisation and have targeted its leaders with drone strikes. But the group also operates like a criminal network. Unlike the Islamic State group, it does not typically execute western hostages, preferring to ransom them for cash.