The Canadian government is calling for the release of a couple who has been held in captivity in northern Afghanistan for four years, after captors released a video of the pair.
The video shows Canadian Joshua Boyle and American Caitlan Coleman and their two children, who were born in captivity.
“We have waited since 2012 for somebody to understand our problems,” Coleman was shown saying in the video as she appealed to both U.S. President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump to rescue her family. She described “the Kafkaesque nightmare in which we find ourselves,” while pleading with their governments to negotiate with the captors.
The couple has been held by the Haqqani network, a Taliban faction, which seized them in late 2012 as they were backpacking in Wardak Province, an insurgent stronghold near Kabul. Coleman was pregnant at the time with their first child.
The video is the first time the couple has been seen since a video released in August, in which they warned their captors would kill them unless the Afghan government ended its execution of Taliban prisoners.
Since the abduction, the United States government has tried to win their release but there have been repeated setbacks. The Haqqani network has demanded the release of Anas Haqqani, one of its commanders, who was captured by the Afghan intelligence service in 2014. The Afghan government has sentenced him to death.
There was no immediate reaction from the U.S. State Department or the Afghan government.
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