A woman who was rescued last week with her family after being held hostage for five years in Afghanistan had to be rushed to the hospital on Monday.
Caitlyn Coleman’s husband told The Associated Press in an email that she is still in the hospital, but did not specify why she was taken.
‘My wife has been through hell, and she has to be my first priority right now,’ Joshua Boyle wrote in the email.
Boyle, who is Canadian, his American wife and their three children were rescued Wednesday, five years after the couple was abducted in Afghanistan on a backpacking trip.
The children were born in captivity.
Caitlyn Coleman’s’s husband told The Associated Press in an email that she is still in the hospital, but did not specify why she was taken. She is pictured in a 2016 file photo with her husband and two children while they were still being held captive in Afghanistan
Coleman, who is pictured on the left, was rushed to the hospital on Monday night, but her husband Joshua Boyle, pictured right, has not said what was wrong. The couple had all of their children while they were in captivity in Afghanistan
Boyle said his eldest son is ‘exuberant; honestly freedom seems to have cured half his ills instantly, he’s running around examining all the gifts compiled over the years’
Joshua Boyle said after landing at Toronto’s airport on Friday that the Taliban-linked Haqqani network killed an infant daughter and raped his wife during the years they were held.
In prior email exchange with AP, Boyle did not respond to a question about the fourth child but later told Canadian Broadcasting Corp. that it was a forced abortion. The Taliban said in a statement it was a miscarriage.
On Monday, Boyle said he and his wife decided to have children even while held captive because they always planned to have a big family and decided, ‘Hey, let’s make the best of this and at least go home with a larger start on our dream family.’
‘We’re sitting as hostages with a lot of time on our hands,’ Boyle explained.
‘We always wanted as many as possible, and we didn’t want to waste time. Cait’s in her 30s, the clock is ticking.’
Boyle said their three children are now four, two and ‘somewhere around six months.’
‘Honestly we’ve always planned to have a family of five, 10, 12 children … We’re Irish, haha,’ he wrote in an email.
The parents of Caitlan Boyle have said they are elated she is free, but also angry at their son-in law for taking their daughter to Afghanistan.
‘Taking your pregnant wife to a very dangerous place, to me, and the kind of person I am, is unconscionable,’ Caitlan’s father, Jim Coleman said, told ABC News.
In an interview with the Toronto Star, Boyle revealed that he thought it was a joke when his captors told him Donald Trump had been elected president of the U.S.
‘It didn’t enter my mind that he was being serious,’ Boyle said.
‘Everything in the house is a wonderland to him,’ Boyle said of the boy born in captivity
Joshua Boyle is seen playing with his son Najaeshi Jonah in the garden of his parents’ home in Smith Falls, Ontario on Saturday. Boyle, his wife and their three kids were freed on Wednesday
Boyle has said conditions during the five-year ordeal changed over time as the family was shuffled among at least three prisons. He has described the first as remarkably barbaric, the second as more comfortable and the third as a place of violence in which he and his wife were frequently separated and beaten.
After returning to his parents’ home in Smiths Falls, Ontario, Boyle emailed the AP a statement saying they had ‘reached the first true ‘home’ that the children have ever known – after they spent most of Friday asking if each subsequent airport was our new house hopefully.’
He also emailed two photos of his son Najaeshi Jonah Makepeace Boyle and said the boy began ‘raiding the first refrigerator of his life.’ The picture shows the boy sitting on the floor in a dark corner with food in his hand. The other shows him napping with a blanket covering part of his face and surrounded by stuffed animals.
Boyle later played with one of his sons in the garden of his parents’ home. The boy appeared happy and healthy, digging in the grass as his father showed off the different plants and later spoke on a cellphone.
Boyle said his wife was raped by a guard who was assisted by his superiors. He asked for the Afghan government to bring them to justice (A still image made from a 2013 video released by the Coleman family shows Coleman and Boyle whole in captivity)
Boyle (pictured, left, with Coleman) said he was in Afghanistan to help villagers ‘who live deep inside Taliban-controlled Afghanistan where no NGO, no aid worker and no government has ever successfully been able to bring the necessary help’The family’s refusal to travel to the United States
Boyle was previously married to Zaynab Khadr (second from left), the sister of Omar Kadhr, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee with suspected ties to al-Qaeda
On a flight from London earlier, Coleman, who is from Stewartstown, Pennsylvania, sat in the business-class cabin wearing a tan head scarf.
She nodded wordlessly as she confirmed her identity to an AP reporter on board. Next to her were her two elder children. In the seat beyond that was Boyle, with their youngest in his lap. Boyle gave a separate, handwritten statement to the AP then, expressing disagreement with U.S. foreign policy and saying, ‘God has given me and my family unparalleled resilience and determination.’
Boyle, a former call center worker, said in an earlier statement that he had gone to Afghanistan with his pregnant wife to help villagers ‘who live deep inside Taliban-controlled Afghanistan where no NGO, no aid worker and no government has ever successfully been able to bring the necessary help.’
Boyle was once briefly married to Zaynab Khadr, the older sister of former Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr and the daughter of a senior al-Qaida financier who had contacts with Osama bin Laden.
The Canadian-born Omar Khadr was 15 when he was captured by U.S. troops following a firefight and was taken to the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay. Officials had discounted any link between that background and Boyle’s capture, with one describing it in 2014 as a ‘horrible coincidence.’