The US threatened to launch a Bin Laden-style SEAL Team 6 raid in Pakistan to free an American woman and her family held as hostages in the country.
Caitlan Coleman, 31, her Canadian partner Joshua Boyle, 34, and their three children were rescued Wednesday, five years after the couple was abducted in neighboring Afghanistan on a backpacking trip.
Their rescue began when a CIA drone caught sight of the mother and her children in a Taliban-linked Haqqani militant camp in northwest Pakistan.
Military planners organized a full Navy SEAL team commando unit to mount a rescue, according to the New York Times, but the mission was called off amid concerns.
The US threatened to launch a Bin Laden-style SEAL Team 6 raid in Pakistan to free an American woman and her family held as hostages in the country. Pictured, Caitlan Coleman with her Canadian husband Joshua Boyle and two of their children
The family was rescued in the Kurram Valley which is 165 miles from Kabul, where they were kidnapped
America’s top diplomat in Pakistan, Ambassador David Hale, warned his host country that the US was prepared to invade Pakistan just like in 2011 when they killed Bin Laden and within hours the family was located and rescued in Kurram, 165 miles across the border from Kabul where the couple was kidnapped in 2012.
Residents in Kurram said they had seen drones flying above them for days before the rescue.
Pakistani officials say they ambushed the vehicle that was transporting the family and shot out its tires to bring it to a sudden halt.
The US has repeatedly accused Pakistan of harboring and enabling terrorist networks.
America’s top diplomat in Pakistan, Ambassador David Hale, warned his host country that the US was prepared to invade Pakistan just like in 2011 when they killed Bin Laden (pictured)
Pakistanis gather outside the hideout of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden following his death by US Special Forces in a ground operation in Abbottabad in 2011
President Trump and his administration has given repeated warnings to its government that the US will not tolerate its apparent leniency on groups such as the Haqqani network and al-Qaeda.
And it was in Pakistan where Osama Bin Laden hid for years in a secretive compound in Abbottabad as he evaded capture after orchestrating the 9/11 attacks.
Caitlan’s husband earlier told The Associated Press in an email that she is still in the hospital in Canada as of late Monday night, 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.
Their children were born in captivity.
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.
US intelligence officers learned that the family was to be transported to Kurram, a tribal area in Pakistan, in the days before their rescue. Residents there described seeing drones flying above them last week
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’
In a 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.
‘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
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.
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 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’
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.’