What Haqqani hostages said after freedom following 5 years of captivity in Afghanistan

TORONTO: An American woman and her Canadian husband held hostage in Afghanistan for five years have arrived in Canada. 

Following are the updates: (All times EDT 11:35pm Friday; 7.35am Saturday in Dubai)

The couple — US citizen Caitlan Campbell and Canadian Joshua Boyle – were captured five years ago by the Haqqani network while hiking in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Freed hostage Joshua Boyle says captors killed infant daughter, raped his wife - Worl… https://t.co/fBxzfUQQDL ➜ https://t.co/DTlbqPPiui pic.twitter.com/ooSXkz4tj6

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New details have emerged of the dramatic rescue of a Canadian-American family held hostage by a Taliban-linked group for more than five years in Pakistan.

The ex-hostage says the Haqqani network in Afghanistan killed his infant daughter in captivity. Campbell was pregnant at the time, with the couple having three children while they were held hostage.

A senior Pakistani security source said that the family had been saved after a car chase in a northwestern tribal region that borders Afghanistan, with Pakistani army troops shooting the tyres of the vehicle carrying the family leading them to be saved. 

The rescue — which also involved US drones hovering in the area — is a rare positive moment for US-Pakistan relations in recent months, with tensions having been raised after President Donald Trump called on the country to do more to stop terrorist groups on its borders. 

Reports indicated that Boyle had refused to board an American C-130 for a flight to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

'Boyle: Daughter killed, wife raped'

Here's the latest on the US-Canadian family rescued from captivity (all times EDT): 11:35 pm (7.35 am Saturday in Dubai):

Canadian ex-hostage Joshua Boyle said the Haqqani network in Afghanistan killed his infant daughter in captivity and raped his wife.

Boyle gave a statement after landing in Canada late Friday with his American wife and three young children.

Caitlan Campbell and Joshua Boyle were rescued Wednesday, five years after they had been abducted by a Taliban-linked extremist network while in Afghanistan as part of a backpacking trip.

Campbell was pregnant at the time and had four children in captivity.

Government officials said Pakistani forces carried out the rescue mission based on US intelligence information. The final leg of the family's journey was an Air Canada flight Friday from London to Toronto.

At 9:05 pm EDT, after landing in Canada with their three young children, Boyle provided a written statement to The Associated Press saying, "God has given me and my family unparalleled resilience and determination."

Coleman and Boyle were rescued Wednesday, five years after they had been abducted by a Taliban-linked extremist network while in Afghanistan as part of a backpacking trip. Coleman was pregnant at the time and had three children in captivity.

Government officials said Pakistani forces executed the rescue mission based on US intelligence information.

The final leg of the family's journey was an Air Canada flight Friday from London to Toronto.

The parents of an American woman freed with her family after five years of captivity say they are elated, 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 Coleman's father, Jim, told ABC News.

Caitlan Coleman and Joshua Boyle were rescued Wednesday, five years after they had been abducted by a Taliban-linked extremist network while in Afghanistan as part of a multi-nation backpacking trip.

Two Pakistani security officials say the family left by plane from Islamabad on Friday.

Who are Caitlan and Joshua?

Caitlan Coleman is from Stewartstown, Pennsylvania, and Boyle is Canadian. She was a small-town American woman yearning to explore. He once married a Guantanamo inmate’s sister.

Coleman and Boyle’s ordeal has remained largely a mystery, and one of the strangest hostage dramas since the day they were abducted.

Five years after their capture, during which a 2016 hostage video showed Coleman pleading for an end to "the Kafkaesque nightmare in which we find ourselves," the family is free.

But little is known of the couple’s reasons for striking out to Central Asia in the first place, with seemingly no endgame in focus.

Their adventures took them to Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan, where they befriended locals in the countryside and joined caravans with other travellers. They sent postcards home chronicling their adventures.

"Only God knows exactly where it will lead or what all can be accomplished, seen, experienced or learned while we travel," Caitlan wrote in an email in July 2012 on the eve of her departure, according to Caitlan’s neighbour Holly Otterbein, who wrote an article for Philadelphia magazine last year. "So we put ourselves in His hands."

Coleman grew up in the tiny community of Stewartstown, Pennsylvania. She is described by friends as soft-spoken, individualistic, an all-American sweetheart.

In September 2012, one month before her capture, she wrote to friends to describe her joy in "getting to know some of the most unique, quirky people I have ever met, and learning from them. It really gives you a different perspective on the world".

Coleman was several months pregnant at the time the couple were kidnapped ─ "naive," but also "adventuresome" with a humanitarian bent, her father James told The Associated Press in 2012.

Boyle was raised in Ottawa. They met as teenagers online, shared a passion for science fiction and the Star Wars movies, and got married in 2011 during a trip to Central America, according to Canadian press reports.

"How did a self-described ‘pacifist Mennonite hippy-child’ from rural Canada end up as a prisoner of the most brutal terrorist group in Central Asia? Not even his family is sure," Boyle’s friend Alex Edwards wrote in a blog post in 2015.

"He was a rebel, an iconoclast, a Robin Hood. I hope he still is."

Boyle was drawn to politics, extremist personalities, and justice issues surrounding the detentions in Guantanamo, according to Edwards.

Boyle’s parents were given occasional glimpses of their son’s and daughter-in-law’s life in captivity, in correspondence delivered through intermediaries.

Coleman's parents last had a conversation with their son-in-law on Oct 8, 2012, via an email sent from an internet cafe he'd 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'd given birth to a second child in captivity. It's unclear whether they knew she'd 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.

Boyle recounted in one letter how he helped deliver his second son in the darkness, with a flashlight between his teeth.

"Ta-da!" he wrote to his parents, according to a September 2016 report in the Toronto Star.

"The astonished captors were good and brought all our post-partum needs, so he is now fat and healthy, praise God."

In two videos from last December and January that the hostages’ families shared this year, the couple’s two sons appear healthy but dishevelled.

Coleman's mother, Lynda, said the opportunity to finally speak to her daughter after she was freed was "incredible."

"I've been waiting to hear that voice for so long. And then to hear her voice and have it sound exactly like the last time I talked to her," she said.

Pakistan's foreign Ministry spokesman Nafees Zakaria said the Pakistani raid that led to the family's rescue was based on a tip from US intelligence and shows that Pakistan will act against a "common enemy" when Washington shares information.

US officials have long accused Pakistan of ignoring groups like the Haqqani network, which was holding the family.

A US national security official, who was not authorized to discuss operational details of the release and spoke only on condition of anonymity, said the US obtained actionable information, passed it to Pakistani government officials, asked them to interdict and recover the hostages — and they did.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump, who previously warned Pakistan to stop harbouring militants, praised Pakistan for its willingness to "do more to provide security in the region."

The operation appeared to have 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."

How rescue happened, according to Boyle

Boyle told his parents that he, his wife and their children were intercepted by Pakistani forces while being transported in the back or trunk of their captors' car and that some of his captors were killed.

He suffered only a shrapnel wound, his family said.

US officials did not confirm those details.

A US military official said that a military hostage team had flown to Pakistan Wednesday prepared to fly the family out.

The team did a preliminary health assessment and had a transport plane ready to go, but sometime after daybreak Thursday, as the family members were walking to the plane, Boyle said he did not want to board, the official said.

Boyle's father said his son did not want to board the plane because it was headed to Bagram Air Base and that 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 former Guantanamo 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 firefight and was taken to the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay.

'Horrible coincidence'

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 is wanted for any federal crime.

The couple told US officials and their families they wanted to fly commercially to Canada. The US officials were not authorized to publicly discuss details of the release and spoke on condition of anonymity.

US officials call the Haqqani group a terrorist organization and have targeted its leaders with drone strikes.

But the group also operates like a criminal network. Unlike the Daesh group, it does not typically execute Western hostages, preferring to ransom them for cash.

The Haqqani network had previously demanded the release of Anas Haqqani, a son of the founder of the group, in exchange for turning over the American-Canadian family.

In one of the videos released by their captors, Boyle implored the Afghan government not to execute Taliban prisoners, or he and his wife would be killed.

Several other Americans being held hostage

US officials have said that several other Americans are being held by militant groups in Afghanistan or Pakistan.

They include Kevin King, 60, a teacher at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul who was abducted in August 2016, and Paul Overby, an author in his 70s who had traveled to the region several times but disappeared in eastern Afghanistan in mid-2014.