The family held captive for 5 years in Pakistan is finally en route to Canada after initially refusing to board a US plane

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The young family freed this week from Haqqani network captivity have boarded a commercial flight to London from Islamabad, Pakistan, and will travel to Canada from there, a Pakistani military official told CNN.

Joshua Boyle, a Canadian, and his American wife, Caitlan Coleman, were held hostage by the network for five years after they were abducted while traveling in Afghanistan. Each of the couple’s three children were born in captivity.

Speculation abounded Thursday after media reports said Boyle had refused to board a US transport plane that American officials had arranged for them. One US official told The Associated Press that Boyle had been nervous about being in "custody" given his background, though another official clarified that the family was not formally in US custody.

White House chief of staff John Kelly also said on Thursday that US officials had "arrangements to transport them back to the United States, or to Canada, anywhere they wanted to go." He added that the family is receiving medical and psychological treatment.

"They’ve been essentially living in a hole for five years," Kelly said.

It’s unclear what precisely about Boyle’s background made him nervous around US officials, but media reports have noted that Boyle was once married to Zaynab Khadr — the sister of the Canadian-born former Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr — who has expressed sympathies with Al Qaeda.

The siblings’ late father, Ahmed Said Khadr, was an Al Qaeda financier close to Osama bin Laden, with whom the family had once briefly stayed. Officials, however, have dismissed any notion that the family’s capture was connected to Boyle’s previous marriage. In 2014, they described the Khadr family link as a "horrible coincidence."

In an interview with the Toronto Star on Thursday, which took place during a phone call to his Ontario-based parents, Boyle said his family looks forward to rebuilding their lives.

"My family is obviously psychologically and physically shattered by the betrayals and the criminality of what has happened over the past five years," Boyle told the Star. "But we’re looking forward to a new lease on life, to use an overused idiom, and restarting and being able to build a sanctuary for our children and our family in North America."

Boyle added, jokingly, "I have discovered there is little that cannot be overcome by enough Sufi patience, Irish irreverence, and Canadian sanctimony."

The rescue

AP Photo/Bill GormanThe release came together rapidly Wednesday. It happened nearly five years to the day after Coleman and Boyle lost touch with their families while traveling in a mountainous region near the Afghan capital of Kabul.

The couple set off in the summer of 2012 for a journey that took them to Russia, the central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, and then to Afghanistan. Coleman’s parents last heard from their son-in-law on October 8, 2012, from an internet cafe in what Boyle described as an "unsafe" part of Afghanistan.

The only trace of the couple since has been in the form of videos released by their captors and family letters.

Coleman’s parents told the online Circa News service in July 2016 that they received a letter from their daughter in November 2015, in which she wrote that she’d given birth to a second child in captivity. It’s unclear whether they knew she’d had a third.

"I pray to hear from you again, to hear how everybody is doing," the letter read.

In that interview, Jim Coleman issued a plea to top Taliban commanders to be "kind and merciful" and let the couple go.

Boyle’s parents said last year that a Taliban-released video had given them their first glimpse of their grandchildren.

"It is an indescribable emotional sense one has watching a grandson making faces at the camera, while hearing our son’s leg chains clanging up and down on the floor as he tries to settle his son," the Boyles said in a written statement. "It is unbelievable that they have had to shield their sons from their horrible reality for four years."

The parents say their son told them in a letter that he and his wife have tried to protect the children by pretending their signs of captivity were part of a game being played with guards.

"It is simply heartbreaking to watch both boys so keenly observing their new surroundings in a makeshift film studio, while listening to their mother describe how they were made to watch her being defiled," the Boyles said.

US officials call the Haqqani group a terrorist organization and have targeted its leaders with drone strikes. But the group also operates like a criminal network. Unlike the Islamic State group, it does not typically execute Western hostages, preferring to ransom them for cash.

The US has long criticized Pakistan for failing to aggressively go after the Haqqanis. In recent remarks on his Afghanistan policy, Trump said that billions were paid to Pakistan "at the same time they are housing the very terrorists that we are fighting."

"But that will have to change, and that will change immediately," he added.

In his statement Thursday, Trump described the release as "a positive moment for our country’s relationship with Pakistan."

"The Pakistani government’s cooperation is a sign that it is honoring America’s wishes for it to do more to provide security in the region," he said. "We hope to see this type of cooperation and teamwork in helping secure the release of remaining hostages and in our future joint counterterrorism operations."

Canada’s foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, said her country was "greatly relieved" the family was safe, and she thanked the US, Afghan, and Pakistani governments for their efforts.

"Joshua, Caitlan, their children, and the Boyle and Coleman families have endured a horrible ordeal over the past five years," Freeland said." We stand ready to support them as they begin their healing journey."

Editor’s note: This story has been updated from a previous version, titled "The family freed after 5 years of Taliban captivity now refuses to board US plane," to reflect that the family boarded a flight early on Friday and is traveling to Canada.

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