“My children have seen their mother defiled,” Caitlan Coleman says, staring down the barrel of the camera.
Coleman, 31, is wearing what looks like a makeshift black hijab, covering her dark hair. She is pale and gaunt, her cheekbones protruding in a way they didn’t five years before.
“We can only ask and pray that somebody will recognise the atrocities these men carry out against us as so called retaliation,” she says, reading from a piece of paper.
“If we all come out of this safely and alive then it will be a miracle.”
The proof-of-life tape was released 10 months ago, at the beginning of 2017. Coleman and her husband Joshua Boyle had, by this point, spent more than four years in captivity.
Boyle has a long beard, and his face is grey. They both look cold.
And on his knee sit two toddlers, along with a newborn in his wife’s lap.
These three children, at the time of filming the video, did not know a life outside an underground prison.
Listen: The latest episode of Tell Me It’s Going To Be OK. (Post continues below…)
Coleman, from the US, and Boyle, a Canadian, married in 2011, and they were described as a couple who had “caught the travel bug”. It wasn’t a surprise to family and friends when the pair announced their next adventure: a trip to Central Asia.
Top Comments
Do we give Trump credit for this, or were negotiations started with Pakistan in Obamas time?
You give Trump credit. Mind you, Joshua Boyle insisted that he and his family were escorted back by Canadian officals and not the Americans. Boyle was worried that the Americans would question him about his suspected connections (pre backpacking holiday) to the Taliban. Boyle was previously married to a Muslim woman whose brother was a prisoner in Gitmo Bay. There is more to this story than a bad holiday gone wrong.
It was interesting in his televised statement since release, he was talking about why he was there, unprompted. Answering critics?
His first wife is the sister of a terrorist. They weren’t backpacking!
What kind of terrorist?