Questions over couple’s travels to Afghanistan
In the weeks, months and years after Joshua Boyle and Caitlan Coleman went missing in Afghanistan, their families repeated the same story: They were young adventurers, drawn off the beaten track.
“They were interested in cultures that are under-developed,” Caitlan’s mother Lyn said in 2014. They didn’t do things like stay in hotels or visit tourist traps. They were idealists, and a little naive.
Soon after the pair married in 2011, they spent four months in Guatemala. In the summer of 2012, they jetted off for Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Family members called it a backpacking trek. Afghanistan was not a part of the plan, as far as anyone knew.
What happened next has become well-known. Boyle, from Smiths Falls, Ont., and Coleman, from Stewartstown, Pa., did make their way to a remote area of Afghanistan outside Kabul, where they were kidnapped by a group associated with the Taliban and imprisoned for five years before being rescued last week.
The couple and their three children — all born while being held hostage — are now at Boyle’s home in Smiths Falls.
Boyle called on Friday for the Taliban leadership to punish his Haqqani captors. A day later he told The Canadian Press that he wanted to give Taliban leaders “a final chance to actually try to rectify these crimes against humanity, before we turn to other outlets to seek our justice.”
The Taliban Sunday denied Boyle’s allegations that his wife was raped and his daughter killed while being held by the Haqqani.
But why did Boyle and Coleman, seven months pregnant, decide to go to Kabul? What were they trying to ac- complish?
Boyle told reporters he and Coleman went to Afghanistan to try to help “the most neglected minority group in the world, those ordinary villagers who live deep inside Taliban-controlled Afghanistan … where no NGO, no aid worker and no government has ever successfully been able to bring the necessary help.”
In that same statement, Boyle described himself as a “pilgrim.”
It’s not clear how they intended to help, or what they were up to when they were kidnapped.
Coleman’s friend Sarah Flood suggested to USA Today that she and others had a vague notion that the couple intended to do volunteer work. Flood said she related to Coleman’s travel plans because she had just come back from a service trip to Ukraine.
“The idea of going to a country and being helpful is something we absolutely shared,” Flood told USA Today. She also said the trip had been Boyle’s idea, but Coleman quickly got excited about it, even though she was ready to settle down in the United States and start a family.
Richard Cronin befriended the couple at a hostel in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. In a 2012 blog post, Cronin said Boyle’s excitement about Afghanistan convinced him to go.
“I hadn’t thought seriously about travelling to Afghanistan until I started talking to Josh,” he wrote. “He was planning to travel there with his wife Caitlan very shortly. We started talking about Lawrence of Arabia and the explorer Richard Burton. He asked me if I admired these explorers. Of course I did. ‘Wouldn’t you like to be like one of them?’ ”
“I asked Josh where he wanted to go in Afghanistan and he replied ‘All over,’ ” Cronin continued. “He had also said it was safe provided you didn’t go to a region where there were foreign troops and the Taliban, namely the south.”
Boyle’s fascination with the Middle East and Central Asia was more than a decade in the making.
After the 9/11 attacks, Boyle became consumed by questions of terrorism and Islam, studying up on the issue and learning Arabic. A few years later, he got involved in an effort to get Canadian-born Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr released. Boyle briefly married Khadr’s sister Zaynab. 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 U.S. intelligence officials to speculate that the visit to Afghanistan may have been part of a larger effort to link up with Taliban-affiliated militants.
“I can’t say that (he was ever al-Qaida,)” said one former U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “He was never a fighter on the battlefield. But my belief is that he clearly was interested in getting into it.”
U.S. authorities have denied that Boyle had any ties to terror.
His “first concern in life has always been helping others,” Alex Edwards, a friend of Boyle’s since 2002, told Philadelphia magazine. “If things were different, and I was the one being held hostage, Josh wouldn’t rest until I was free,” says Alex. “He’d stage sit-ins. He’d put up posters. He’d dedicate his life to it. That’s just who he is.”