A newly released Taliban video shows a Canadian man and his American wife pleading for their lives in Afghanistan.
Joshua Boyle and Caitlan Coleman say they and their two children will be killed unless the Kabul government stops executing captured Taliban prisoners.
The couple was seized in October, 2012 during a trip that took them to several central Asian countries.
Just before they went missing, Boyle sent Coleman’s family a message from an Internet cafe in what he described as an “unsafe” part of Afghanistan.
Coleman gave birth to their children while in captivity.
The video, uploaded on YouTube, came to public attention through the U.S.-based Site Intelligence Group, which monitors online extremists’ activity.
Boyle says the couple’s captors “are terrified of the thought of their own mortality approaching, and are saying they will take reprisals on our family.
“They will execute us, women and children included, if the policies of the Afghan government are not overturned, either by the Afghan government or by Canada, somehow, or the United States.”
A Taliban spokesman says the video is not new and was recorded in 2015, adding that Boyle, Coleman and their two children remain in captivity and in good health.
In 2013, the couple appeared in two videos asking the U.S. government to free them from the Taliban.
Last November, Coleman’s parents received a letter in which she said she had given birth to a second child in captivity.
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