Freed North American couple's mysterious story is raising questions

Joshua Boyle and Caitlan Coleman were hiking in a dangerous region near Kabul when they were kidnapped in 2012

Joshua Boyle said extremists raped his wife and killed her infant daughter while in captivity
Joshua Boyle said extremists raped his wife and killed her infant daughter while in captivity

Pakistani officials have described the mission to free an American woman, her Canadian husband and their three children as a harrowing operation and a rare bit of positive news in the troubled relationship between their country and the United States.

Pakistani soldiers, acting on American intelligence, appear to have opened fire Wednesday at the tires of a car carrying Caitlan Coleman, 31, her husband, Joshua Boyle, 34, and their three children not long after it crossed the border from Afghanistan into Pakistan's tribal areas.

A senior Trump administration official, shortly after the family's release, compared their ordeal to "living in a hole for five years."

But the family's dramatic rescue has raised as many questions as it has answered. On Friday night, Coleman, Boyle and their children arrived in Toronto after the family, at the husband's insistence, had refused to get on a plane for the United States.

Boyle's father told the New York Times that his son did not want to stop at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, where Americans have been accused of abusing detainees.

In a statement to the Associated Press, Boyle said, "God has given me and my family unparalleled resilience and determination."

The family's refusal to travel to the United States led some former US officials to speculate about the couple's motives in journeying to Afghanistan five years earlier and suggest that they may be trying to avoid tough questions from US intelligence officials.

Shortly after marrying in 2011, Coleman and Boyle visited Central America and then headed off to Russia and Central Asia. Coleman was pregnant with their first child in 2012 when they decided to go hiking in Wardak province, a dangerous region south of Kabul that is dominated by feuding militant groups.

The couple's decision to visit Wardak and Boyle's unusual personal history set off widespread speculation inside the US intelligence community about his motives. Before he wed Coleman, Boyle had married and divorced the oldest sister of Omar Khadr, a Canadian who was arrested by US forces in Afghanistan in 2002 and was alleged to have ties to al-Qaida.

The patriarch of the Khadr family was killed in 2003, along with al-Qaida and Taliban members, in a shootout with Pakistani security forces near the Afghanistan border. Boyle's associations with the family led some US intelligence officials to speculate that the visit to Afghanistan may have been part of a larger effort to link up with Taliban-affiliated militants.