Couple’s tale of captivity begs further questioning

Many in the media are painting a picture of Joshua Boyle and his American wife, Caitlin Coleman, as victims who suffered years of torment at the hands of their Taliban captors. But there are elements in their story which beg further questioning.

One problem is that non-Muslim journalists today are so afraid of being labelled racist, that obvious questions arising from Boyle’s account of his and his family’s captivity aren’t being asked.

My first questions to Boyle and Coleman would be, “when did you convert to Islam?” and “who had the honour of introducing you to take the ‘shahadah’” (oath of allegiance to Allah and Prophet Muhammad)?

Two things struck me from the first days of television coverage of the reported rescue of the family by the Pakistan army, after being asked by the Americans to do so.

The first was the rapid modification in Boyle’s appearance. He quickly changed from an Afghan or Pashtun appearance to one with a shaved moustache, but with a clipped beard, often a trademark of a political Islamist’s Salafi or Wahhabi bent of mind.

To be fair, orthodox but nonpolitical clerics of Islam can also sport the same facial hair.

Next it was what seemed to me to be Boyle’s change in accent, depending on his audience. When he first spoke in Pakistan, it was a mix of Arabic-Pakistani English.

However, when speaking to the western media, Boyle shifted to a more American pronunciation and in Canada, to a familiar Canadian nuance.

Boyle’s description of himself as a “pilgrim” was missed by many journalists, who apparently don’t know most Muslim places of pilgrimage are in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran and India. And not in the valleys of Wardaq where Boyle says he went with a sense of mission — to help people, “to fix things,” as he told the CBC’s Susan Ormiston.

When Ormiston gently asked Boyle why he wanted to go to Afghanistan with a pregnant wife, he portrayed his decision not as an error of judgment, but as an act of sacrifice, to do “things that nobody else is doing, so I think I have to do it.” What things? He didn’t elaborate. The fact Afghanistan’s Wardaq province has been a Talibandominated area from the time the jihadis came to power seems to have had no bearing on Boyle’s and Coleman’s decision to move there.

Coleman, at least in the media, has demonstrated a characteristic we would expect of a Muslim woman living under Taliban rule. She has let her husband do the talking for her, although she did change out of her black burqa into a stylized Egyptian hijab.

As for their rescue by Pakistan’s army, Amrullah Saleh, a former national security adviser of Afghanistan, wrote in the Indian Express:

“It is an open secret in Kabul that the US-Canadian couple and their family that was recently rescued had been kept in Waziristan for some time, in the exact same part of Pakistan where the Pakistan army only recently declared Mission Accomplished in its Zarb-e-Azb operation and sent all the bad and unwanted terrorists to Afghanistan. ... So when they were released as a result of a well-planned, wellexecuted surgical operation in which only four tires of a vehicle were punctured, we all laughed.”

Perhaps Boyle’s and Coleman’s story would be an intriguing one for Homeland to adapt for television.