Boyle’s wife says captivity ’intolerable’ for her children

OTTAWA — An American woman who endured five years of captivity in Afghanistan said she and her Canadian husband resisted their captors and did the best they could to raise young children in brutal conditions, using bottle caps and cardboard as toys and teaching their eldest son geography and astronomy.

“Obviously it saddened me to see how they were growing up, what they were growing up knowing. But I had to do everything I could do help them,” Caitlan Coleman Boyle told ABC News in an interview broadcast Monday.

Pakistani troops rescued Coleman Boyle, her husband, Joshua Boyle, and their three children on Oct. 11, five years after the couple was abducted in Afghanistan on a backpacking trip. The children were born while the family was being held by the Taliban-linked Haqqani network.

Coleman Boyle, who is from Stewartstown, Penn., said their captors beat their eldest son, Najaeshi, with a stick, and he knew the family was in mortal danger. “Of course this was an intolerable situation for a child to be in, the constant fear, so we had to come up with really unique ideas on how to help him not be afraid,” she said.

Joshua Boyle told ABC how he and his wife physically fought with the guards, and she suffered a broken cheekbone and three broken fingers. “She was very proud of that injury,” he said.