Why we started a family

FORMER hostage Joshua Boyle has spoken about why he and his wife decided to have children while held captive.

Mr Boyle, his American wife, Caitlan Coleman, and their three children were rescued last week, five years after the couple was abducted in Afghanistan during a backpacking trip.

The couple said 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,” Mr Boyle said in an email. “We always wanted as many [children] as possible, and we didn’t want to waste time. Cait’s in her 30s, the clock is ticking.”

He said the kids were 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.

Ms Coleman was pregnant at the time of their abduction and had the children while she was a hostage.

Mr Boyle has previously revealed the Taliban-linked Haqqani network killed their infant daughter and raped his wife during the years they were held.

In the email exchange, Mr Boyle did not respond to a question about the fourth child. The Taliban said in a statement on Sunday it was a miscarriage.

Mr 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 remark- ably 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, Mr Boyle — who was once married to the older sister of former Guantánamo Bay detainee — emailed a statement saying they had “reached the first true ‘home’ that the children have ever known”.