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. "I pray to hear from you again, to hear how everybody is doing," the letter said. “I know that this must be very terrifying and horrifying for my family to hear that these men are willing to go to these lengths,” she says, “but they are.” 
 
 Caitlan lived 10 minutes down the road from where Julia and I are eating breakfast on this overcast day in August. The Colemans received a letter last November in which their daughter said she had given birth to a second child in captivity.  KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The State Department says it's evaluating a video released by the Afghan Taliban showing a Canadian man and his American wife warning that their Afghan captors will kill them and their children unless the Kabul government ends its executions of Taliban prisoners. The first time anyone heard about their change of plans was on October 8, 2012, when Joshua sent an email to Caitlan’s parents saying they were in an “unsafe” place in Afghanistan. The Taliban told reporters this summer that Caitlan and Joshua are “in good health” and in a place where they can move around and exercise. The latest statement from the U.S. government, issued in August, simply said that officials were examining the newest video of the couple and “continue to urge for their immediate release on humanitarian grounds.” The FBI, the Department of Defense, and a new federal organization known as the Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell have all declined to discuss Caitlan’s case with Philadelphia magazine. However, even if the video was recorded in 2015, it would mark the first time the couple has appeared in a video since 2013. Coleman has told her family that she gave birth to two children in captivity. The video, which has not been independently verified by The Associated Press, shows Canadian Joshua Boyle and American Caitlan Coleman, who were kidnapped in Afghanistan in 2012, calling on Canada and the United States to pressure the Afghan government into changing its policy on executing captured Taliban prisoners. In 2013, the couple appeared in two videos asking the U.S. government to free them from the Taliban.
– Caitlan Coleman hailed from Stewartstown, Pa., a "land where bad things aren't supposed to happen." And yet a gripping Philadelphia magazine story describes how something bad did happen to the 26-year-old and her husband—Canadian activist Joshua Boyle, once married to the sister of Gitmo prisoner Omar Khadr—in 2012: They were kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan during a hike across Central Asia. The story by Holly Otterbein (an acquaintance of Coleman's from the same town) documents the disbelief the pair's loved ones felt when they first heard they were missing, the horror when they heard in 2013 the Taliban was holding them captive, and the panic when a series of proof-of-life videos of the two emerged, the third one in August. "We never think that someone we love will end up in a video released by the Taliban," Otterbein writes. But the American public at large is "grotesquely indifferent" to the fate of the couple and their two kids, since born in captivity. Officials believe the couple were taken hostage near Kabul by a Taliban affiliate known as the "Sopranos of the Afghanistan war" and are now being held in Pakistan. They've been in captivity for four years—just one year shy of the five years US Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was held captive. The Taliban told the AP this summer the family was in good health, but in the August video, Coleman and Boyle said they and their kids would be executed unless Kabul officials stop killing Taliban prisoners. Otterbein notes their story has barely made a blip with the media, the US government has remained mostly tight-lipped, and online commentary about the disappeared pair can be cruel: "If we get them back, they would probably travel to Syria for their next little getaway," one poster noted. "Caitlan, like the war in Afghanistan and the fight against the Taliban, has been forgotten," Otterbein writes. (The chilling Philadelphia magazine story is worth the full read.)