US News

Mom held captive by Taliban says she was raped, beaten for trying to protect kids

A Pennsylvania woman kidnapped by Taliban-linked militants and held captive for five years says she was beaten and raped while trying to protect her kids from the brutes, according to a report.

Caitlan Coleman Boyle, 31, of Stewartstown, was pregnant when she and her husband, Joshua Boyle, 34, were kidnapped in Afghanistan in 2012 by the Haqqani group and taken to Pakistan.

She had another son and a daughter while in captivity and said Boyle delivered both by flashlight as she quietly labored in pain.

Caitlan told ABC News that some of their guards “hated children” and would target their eldest son for beatings, claiming he was “making problems” or being “too loud.”

When Caitlan tried to intervene, she also was pummeled.

“I would get beaten or hit or thrown on the ground,” Caitlan told the network.

Her Canadian husband said she suffered serious injuries while trying to prevent the extremists from harming their children.

“She had a broken cheekbone,” Joshua said. “She actually broke her own hand punching one of them. She broke her fingers, so she was very proud of that injury.”

Caitlan said her captors put something in her food to force a miscarriage of their unborn daughter, whom the couple named Martyr Boyle.

She also said that two men raped her as punishment for trying to report the crime to their superiors.

“They just kept saying that this will happen again if we don’t stop speaking about the forced abortion, that this happened because we were trying to tell people what they had done, and that it would happen again,” Caitlan said.

She said she successfully hid her next two pregnancies as the family was moved around Pakistan’s tribal belt.

Joshua, who said he was kept shackled during their captivity, said the family was usually held in a single room, often underground, where the kids would play with discarded items.

“We would just teach them to use things like bottle caps or bits of cardboard, garbage essentially, but what we could find to play with,” Caitlan said.

She said they taught their eldest son the alphabet, geography and constellations.

They also used the tale of the execution of Charles I in 1649 to make up a game about beheadings, to allay the boy’s fears should their captors do the same to his parents.

“He certainly knew that this type of thing could happen to his family, so he had great fun pretending to be Oliver Cromwell chasing Charles I around and trying to behead him,” she said.

“So we made it a game so that he wasn’t afraid because there was, you know, there was nothing we could do if it came to that except try to make him less afraid,” shed added.

The physical abuse of the family increased when the Haqqani Network demanded that Joshua join it as the group’s western propagandist.

“They had come four different times — to offer employment in the group… and I made it very clear that I’d rather be the hostage than be on ‘your side of the cage.’” Joshua said. “I’d rather be inside than outside.”

But his refusal carried severe consequences.

“There were beatings. There was violence. Then they’d come to make the offer again. Still said no. More beatings, more violence. Maybe that’ll be the solution. Still no,” Joshua said.

“And after the final time — that’s when they killed our daughter. And after that there were no more intimations of recruitment.”

The couple and their children – who are now 4, 2 and less than a year old — were released in mid-October in what was described by the Pakistani military as an operation carried out by its troops.

But the circumstances of their release remain unclear.

The US government had planned a commando raid to free them, but authorities were blindsided when the family appeared in the custody of Pakistani soldiers, according to ABC News.

Joshua — who was previously married to the Canadian daughter of a suspected al Qaeda member — did not answer questions from ABC News about why he was in Afghanistan.

But he told reporters in Toronto last month that he and Caitlan had been captured while trying to help poor Afghans.

“I was in Afghanistan helping the most neglected minority group in the world, those ordinary villagers who lived deep inside Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, where no NGO, no aide worker and no government has ever successfully been able bring the necessary help,” he said.

Joshua and Caitlan are now focused on giving their kids a chance to heal from the nightmare.

“I hope that they find enough happiness and joy to make up for it,” Caitlan said.