Foley's Family Threatened With Prosecution if His Ransom Was Paid

The slender American woman in the black abaya looks directly at the photographic camera, her two children, their faces caked with clay, sitting just to her left.

"Today is Dec 3, 2016. We have waited since 2012 for someone to understand our bug, the Kafkaesque nightmare in which we find ourselves," she says in the video released past her captors in Afghanistan belatedly last year. "My children take seen their mother defiled. We ask, in our collective 14th year of prison, that the governments on both sides reach some understanding to allow us freedom."

Then, aiming her words squarely at President Obama, she adds ane more message.

"Your legacy on leaving us is probably important to yous as our lives and those of our children are to us," she says, reading from the prepared text in her hands. "So please don't become the side by side Jimmy Carter. But give the offenders something so they and y'all can save face and we tin exit the region permanently."

The woman is a Pennsylvania resident named Caitlan Coleman, and she, her hubby, and their two young sons have been held by the Taliban for more than four years. The family are the longest-held of the handful of Americans known to still exist in militant hands at that place. (The family unit of American author Paul Overby revealed in January that he has been missing since May 2014, while the Taliban merely released a new video of U.s. academic Kevin King and his Australian colleague Timothy Weeks, whom they kidnapped in August 2016, tearfully pleading for their lives.)

We know Coleman's proper noun, and we know the name of her married man, Canadian Joshua Boyle. Just nosotros don't the names of her sons, both of whom were born in Taliban captivity. The children have likely never met other Americans or read any English-language books. In the video, the older boy, believed to be almost 4, is belongings on to his brother, thought to be around 2. At i point the older child laughs and smiles at someone off photographic camera, who promptly shushes him.

When we remember about US hostages in Transitional islamic state of afghanistan and Pakistan, many of us recollect nearly Bowe Bergdahl, the U.s. soldier who walked off his base and was snatched by the Taliban in 2009 before being freed in a controversial prisoner swap in 2014. Bergdahl was the subject of the near recent season of the pop Series podcast; during the presidential campaign, Donald Trump called him a "a "dingy rotten traitor" who should have been executed for walking away from his Army post voluntarily before being kidnapped.

The Coleman saga has unfolded very differently. It begins with a risky determination by an idealistic couple seeking one terminal big adventure before becoming parents, and continues through years of bureaucratic indecision and infighting by a United states authorities securely divided over how far to go to try to get them back.

The Pentagon has a longstanding policy of doing everything possible to get missing troops back, even if it means swapping prisoners. The US regime, by dissimilarity, has an equally longstanding policy of refusing to negotiate with terror groups or to pay ransoms to purchase the release of American noncombatant captives. Until recently, the families of missing US citizens were sometimes even told that they could exist prosecuted under federal law — and potentially jailed — if they paid ransoms on their ain.

Caitlan Coleman'due south parents have never talked to their daughter'south captors and don't know the names of their grandchildren. Unlike the families of other missing Americans, they have maintained a deliberately low profile and rarely talk to the media. When I spoke with Jim Coleman, he told me that he and his wife were yet dealing with the shock of the new video, but were trying to remain optimistic by focusing on the hope that their daughter was building relationships with the Afghan or Pakistani women living near wherever she'southward being held.

"I like to imagine Caity sitting around knitting with the other women while all of the different kids are playing together," he told me. "That's my hope — that my grandchildren accept other kids around."

The grim reality, though, is that United states officials directly involved in the case believe they'd twice come close to nailing downwards deals that would have brought the family unit back, only to see those efforts stymied by other parts of the American government. In a previously unreported attempted bargain, a Taliban representative told Us military negotiators that they'd free the Coleman family in exchange for a ransom of $150,000. The military passed the details to the FBI, which oversees strange kidnapping cases involving US citizens, but the agency never followed upward.

The question now is whether Donald Trump volition be willing and able to practise what Barack Obama would not: make the type of concessions needed to strike a deal with the Taliban fighters holding the Coleman family unit. Trump has promised to have a hard line toward Islamist militants around the world. He also fancies himself a world-class dealmaker, and would love to score some early political wins. It'southward difficult to imagine a bigger 1 than being able to welcome a missing American woman and her two children back to the US.

That's far from guaranteed, however. This is the story of how promising before efforts to bring the family unit dorsum went awry — and of why Caitlan Coleman, Joshua Boyle, and their two children remain stuck in Afghanistan in the hands of captors who accept threatened to kill them all.

A young couple went to Afghanistan. They never came back.

Caitlan Coleman and Joshua Boyle in 2009.

Courtesy of the Coleman family unit

Coleman and Boyle are Star Wars fanatics who beginning met more than a decade ago on an net site defended to the movies. They were drawn to each other, in part, by a shared love of adventure and a belief that people of all backgrounds were fundamentally expert.

"They actually and truly believed that if people were loved and treated with respect that that would be given back to them in kind," Linda Boyle, Joshua Boyle'southward female parent, told the Associated Press. "So every bit odd information technology as information technology may seem to us that they were there, they truly believed with all their centre that if they treated people properly, they would be treated properly."

Their thinking was shaped by the months they'd spent traveling through Latin America and later living among impoverished indigenous people in Guatemala. Their families told the Associated Press that children there started calling Boyle, who was somewhat overweight, "Santa Claus" after he grew his beard out.

The couple got married in Guatemala in 2011; a brusque time later on, Coleman discovered that she was significant, news she didn't share with her parents. Jim and Lynda Coleman didn't discover the truth until they found a printed sonogram after their daughter went missing in Transitional islamic state of afghanistan.

Coleman and Boyle wanted to have one last adventure before settling into parenthood. In the summertime of 2012, they fix off on a winding trip that took them through Russian federation, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyz republic earlier arriving in Afghanistan that fall. The programme caught her parents off baby-sit.

Lynda Coleman, Caitlan's mother, told Philadelphia Magazine reporter Holly Otterbein that her daughter had told her parents they'd stay out of the Transitional islamic state of afghanistan.

"They weren't supposed to go to Afghanistan," Lynda said. "They promised us they wouldn't go."

In the commodity, a lengthy joint contour of Coleman and Boyle, several of Coleman's friends and relatives described her as a kindhearted, generous woman who had raised money for the poor in Haiti as a ten-year-former so grew into the type of adult who never forgot a altogether or failed to reach out when someone shut to her was in need.

Still, they acknowledged that Coleman was as well naive and too quick to assume the all-time about the people around her.

"She always tried to come across the best in people," Julia Newberger-Johnson, a friend of Coleman's since high schoolhouse, told Otterbein, "and I guess that'due south office of why they concluded up where they are."

Others, peculiarly in the The states military, are even harsher in their assessment of Coleman's pick to travel to Transitional islamic state of afghanistan, one of the near dangerous regions in the globe, in what would accept been the third trimester of her pregnancy.

"It'due south non simply reckless," one senior officer who served in Afghanistan at the time the family went missing told me. "Information technology's fucking crazy."

Coleman, then 26, was due in early January, and she and Boyle, and then 29, planned to return home in December so she'd deliver the baby in the The states. She never made information technology: Coleman's parents last heard from their daughter and son-in-police in an October 2012 electronic mail Boyle sent from what he described as an "dangerous" office of Afghanistan.

Boyle was right to worry: Shortly later on sending that email, he and Coleman were snatched past the Taliban, the militant Islamist group that has been battling the US since the 2001 invasion of Transitional islamic state of afghanistan. In 2013, the couple appeared in a pair of propaganda videos asking Washington to do whatever was necessary to costless them from Taliban captivity.

Coleman'due south parents didn't see her confront once again until Baronial 2016, when the Taliban released a video of Coleman and Boyle pleading with the US and Canada to find ways to prevent the Afghan government from executing Taliban prisoners and alarm that the militants would impale them and their children if the demands weren't met.

Still photos from Taliban videos of the family. Top left: July 2013. Top right: September 2013. Bottom left: August 2016. Bottom right: Dec 2016.

"They are willing to kill us, willing to kill women, to kill children, to impale whomever to get these policies reversed or to take revenge," Coleman says in the video. "Considering of this, I ask if my authorities tin can do anything to change the policies of the Afghan authorities, to finish their policy of executing men earlier these men get-go executing their prisoners, their family unit that they are holding."

Soon later on the video was fabricated public, a senior member of the Taliban told Reuters that the timing of its release was meant to force per unit area Kabul not to deport out the death sentence given to Anas Haqqani, an imprisoned militant whose father founded the Haqqani network. Haqqani remains in a prison in Kabul, according to the Afghan ambassador to the US, Hamdullah Mohib. That means Haqqani could still be part of a potential hereafter deal for Coleman, Boyle, and their children.

The fourth and final video — the merely one to testify Coleman'due south children — was posted to YouTube in late Dec. United states of america and Afghan officials familiar with the case say that no new talks with the Taliban have started since the video was released, and that none seem likely in the about futurity. That shouldn't necessarily come up every bit a surprise.

The Us and its allies don't negotiate with terrorists, except for when they do

On paper, every president since Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan has abided past a unproblematic maxim: The US won't negotiate with terrorists, and it won't brand whatsoever concessions to them. There's a simple logic at play. If terrorists believe they tin modify The states policy past grabbing Americans — or receive coin, weapons, or prisoners in exchange — the groups will have fiscal incentives to kidnap more than The states citizens.

That was precisely the rationale Reagan used when he reiterated the policy in 1985 after TWA Flight 847 was hijacked by Shiite terrorists who executed a US Navy diver and threatened to kill more hostages unless dozens of militants were freed from Israeli jails (the remaining hostages were eventually released unharmed).

"America volition never make concessions to terrorists — to exercise and then would only invite more terrorism — nor will we ask nor pressure whatever other government to do so," Reagan said. "Once nosotros caput down that path in that location would be no finish to it, no end to the suffering of innocent people, no terminate to the encarmine ransom all civilized nations must pay."

In practice, though, many American presidents have been perfectly willing to throw out that policy and cutting unsavory deals if information technology meant bringing back missing Americans. In the Reagan years, for example, Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North tried to win the release of US hostages in Lebanon by selling weapons to Iran, which was considered a terrorist land.

Reagan consistently denied knowing about what somewhen became known every bit the Iran-Contra affair, but that doesn't change the fact that members of an administration that had sworn never to talk to terrorists eventually did just that.

In April 2002, then-President George W. Bush said, "No nation can negotiate with terrorists, for at that place is no way to make peace with those whose only goal is death."

At the same time, and with no public detect, his administration helped pay a $300,000 ransom payment to Abu Sayyaf, an al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group in the Philippines that was holding a pair of American missionaries. The money was raised privately, simply the White House, FBI, and State Section knew nigh the negotiations with the kidnappers and helped adapt and evangelize the funds.

Britain and Canada, like the US, reject to pay ransoms to kidnappers holding their citizens. The governments of some of America's other closest allies, all the same, do routinely negotiate with terror groups and pay ransoms to win the release of captive citizens. A 2014 investigation by the New York Times plant that al-Qaeda and its affiliates in places like Africa had taken in at least $125 one thousand thousand in revenues from kidnapping since 2008, including $66 million in 2013 lonely:

These payments were fabricated almost exclusively by European governments, which funneled the money through a network of proxies, sometimes masking information technology as development aid...

In its early on years, Al Qaeda received nigh of its money from deep-pocketed donors, but counterterrorism officials now believe the group finances the bulk of its recruitment, grooming and arms purchases from ransoms paid to free Europeans.

Put more than bluntly, Europe has become an inadvertent underwriter of al Qaeda.

The Colemans and other families of U.s.a. hostages missing in Afghanistan or the Heart East, by dissimilarity, have been given conflicting government guidance about whether they could try to pay ransoms to become their relatives back. The mixed messaging reflected a sharp separate between the FBI and State Department on the one hand, and the Justice Department and many in the Obama White House on the other.

In that location is no police force on the books banning families from paying ransoms to foreign kidnappers who have captured their loved ones, and many companies operating in dangerous parts of the world — specially from the oil and energy sectors — have long had insurance to cover the costs of hiring firms specializing in hostage recovery.

"This was something the US authorities was perfectly happy to leave to the individual sector," said Brian Michael Jenkins, a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation who previously held a senior post at Kroll Associates, ane of the largest and best-known of the hostage recovery firms. "Information technology was something I was personally doing for years at Kroll, where we handled a kidnapping every ii weeks."

In this June 2014 photograph, Linda Boyle (left) and Lynda Coleman hold a photo of their married children, who were kidnapped by the Taliban in late 2012.

AP Photo/Bill Gorman, File

The FBI itself sometimes worked directly with the families of missing Americans to strike deals with strange kidnappers.

Take the example of the American missionaries held in the Philippines. Equally detailed by Shane Harris, then of Foreign Policy, the FBI helped adapt the $300,000 ransom payment designed to win the release of Martin and Gracia Burnham, who had been kidnapped by Abu Sayyaf. A erstwhile United states official told Harris that the FBI had worked to hide its part in the push to get the Burnhams back, and that Abu Sayyaf didn't know of the Usa involvement.

The endeavor ultimately failed: The Burnham family paid the coin, but Abu Sayyaf didn't release the hostages. Martin Burnham was later killed during a Filipino military machine raid that freed his wife.

The federal government's de facto policy of looking the other way when families paid ransoms for the release of their missing loved ones began to markedly alter after ISIS started kidnapping Americans in Syria in 2014, when the group burst onto the world stage by quickly conquering large swaths of Republic of iraq and Syria and instituting a brutal course of Islamic law.

Senior Obama administration officials told me in interviews at the time that they believed ISIS would never hold good-faith discussions and would use whatsoever ransom payments to fund new attacks at home or away. Giving coin to Latin American insurgents waging uprisings in their own countries was one thing; giving coin to a transnational terror group with ambitions of striking the W was something entirely different.

The White House was fifty-fifty willing to employ the threat of criminal prosecution to continue families from trying to talk to ISIS virtually the captive Americans. On at least 3 occasions, Col. Mark Mitchell, a counterterror specialist on the staff of the White Business firm's National Security Council, explicitly told the families that paying a ransom could lead to them facing charges under federal anti-terror financing laws.

Diane Foley, the mother of convict announcer James Foley, said that she felt confident Mitchell was misstating the police, just felt intimidated all the same because he was speaking for the White Business firm. She told me in an interview that she was also struck by the fact that "he didn't sound sympathetic" and was instead talking in a flat monotone.

"A family had never been prosecuted for trying to raise a ransom for a loved ane, so that was merely him misspeaking," she told me in an interview. "He was trying to intimidate us, and it was appalling."

The Foleys weren't the but ones angered by Mitchell'due south comments. A senior The states official told me earlier this year that the Justice Section had never prosecuted a family for paying a ransom to the captors holding their relatives, and wouldn't take if any of the families had been able to strike a bargain with ISIS. "I was dumbfounded that he'd basically threaten them," the official told me.

In the end, no ransoms were e'er paid to ISIS, and the senior Us official told me that the families had never held any serious negotiations with the group. ISIS would later release grisly videos showing its beheadings of two more American citizens, journalist Steven Sotloff and aid worker Peter Kassig. ISIS says that Kayla Mueller, another American held by the group, was killed in a Jordanian airstrike; the group sent her parents photographs of her corpse as proof of her decease.

Caitlan Coleman'due south parents have faced the same unrelenting pain and incertitude as the Foleys, Sotloffs, and Muellers did earlier they go definitive give-and-take of the fate of their missing children.

Simply they have a reason for muted optimism almost her eventual release that the other families weren't fortunate enough to share: Coleman and her family unit are beingness held by a group in Afghanistan with a long history of ransoming back hostages rather than killing them.

ISIS kills its United states hostages. The Taliban tries to cash in on them.

The Taliban's steady release of videos showing Coleman and her family unit provide a striking illustration of the cadre divergence between the fashion the Taliban views its American hostages and the way ISIS sees them. To the Taliban and its allies in the Haqqani network, the convict Westerners are chits that tin be traded for coin or prisoners. To ISIS, the hostages are useful primarily as the unwilling centerpieces of the propaganda videos built around their eventual executions.

Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert who spent almost five years advising Washington's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told me that the Taliban and the Haqqani network are fighting to expel foreign troops from their land and to create an Islamic government in that location, merely have no aspirations of carrying out attacks across the country'due south borders or trying to conquer neighboring nations. They want to be part of the international organisation, not overturn it.

ISIS, by dissimilarity, doesn't believe in borders or recognize the validity of the modern nation state. Instead, Barnett says, they want to conquer as much territory as they can and subsume information technology into their self-proclaimed caliphate.

"ISIS uses hostages either to extract money or to demonstrate its terrifying character to intimidate the West into leaving ISIS alone to boss the Islamic globe," he says. "The Taliban uses hostages to raise coin and to seek recognition as a legitimate and effective partner in international affairs."

The Haqqani network, the Taliban affiliate that is holding the Colemans, kidnaps and keeps Western hostages for an even more prosaic reason: the hefty ransoms they can receive in exchange for their liberty. I've spent significant time in Afghanistan, and United states military machine officials in that location repeatedly described the Haqqanis every bit skilled fighters who operated more like a criminal gang — several, separately, likened them to the Sopranos — than a terror network.

The group got its starting time contesting the Soviet Marriage, just grew steadily more radical in the runup to the 9/11 terror attacks. When Usa forces swept into Afghanistan, the Haqqani network morphed into Washington's virtually effective battleground adversary, using advanced weaponry from Pakistan to kill hundreds of U.s.a. troops and maim thousands more.

To fund its operations, the grouping has gear up what amounts to a vast criminal enterprise that includes both mafia-style extortion rackets targeting ordinary Afghans and Pakistanis and ongoing attempts to kidnap foreigners for money. It's a lucrative way of raising money: When the Taliban snatched nineteen South Korean missionaries in 2007, the group's leaders said Seoul paid $xx million for their freedom. More recently, Taliban leaders told the Daily Beast in 2011 that France paid a bribe of tens of millions of dollars to purchase the release of ii French hostages.

The fact that the Taliban sees hostage taking as a moneymaking enterprise is why then many involved in the Coleman case believe she could be gratuitous by at present. The talks U.s.a. military negotiators held with a representative of the Haqqani network — confirmed by two people with direct knowledge of the matter — stand for one of the biggest missed opportunities.

The Haqqani representative told the military personnel that they'd exist willing to costless the hostages in commutation for a bribe of $150,000, a relatively paltry sum for cases involving missing Americans. The U.s.a. military personnel passed the representative's contact information to the FBI, but the agency never pursued what appears to accept been the most promising artery to appointment for bringing the Coleman family home, according to the two sources. The FBI declined to annotate.

Unlike ISIS, the group has as well shown a willingness to keep hostages live for years while negotiating over the terms of their release. Bergdahl says he was tortured brutally during his years in captivity later on trying to escape, but some other hostages have said their captors provided them with food, water, and medical attention. In a video plea to the Taliban in June 2016, Coleman's parents thanked the group for "extending its hospitality to and providing Caity and her family with care."

Put another way, hostages held by the Taliban and its Haqqani affiliates — like Bergdahl — have a expert chance of returning dwelling house; those held by ISIS don't.

The Bergdahl trade was enormously controversial, with an internal government watchdog later concluding that the Obama administration broke the constabulary by releasing the Taliban prisoners without giving Congress proper notice. The Colemans and the families of those held by ISIS were outraged that the Obama administration, subsequently saying for years that it wouldn't swap prisoners for the hostages, had done exactly that.

"Nosotros were told that the United states of america government will not commutation hostages — period," Jim Coleman told Circa News in November. "But they did."

Controversy aside, the former senior U.s.a. military machine officer who was directly involved in those talks told me that he thinks the United states was right to negotiate with the militants.

Instead, he has a blunter and far more devastating critique: Washington could have gotten a better bargain, 1 that too included Coleman and the other missing Western hostages.

"Information technology should take been the v Taliban prisoners for Bergdahl, Warren Weinstein, Caitlan Coleman, Josh Boyle, and their son," the former officer said, noting that Coleman's second son hadn't been born at the time of the possible prisoner swap. "We could have gotten everybody out. Caitlan and her kids should be dwelling house by now."

The Pentagon thought it had a deal to gratuitous Coleman and her children. The Country Department killed it.

On June eleven, 2015, a highly busy member of the United states Special Forces took a seat in a packed committee room on Capitol Hill and told the lawmakers that the military had been extremely close to an understanding to costless the Colemans and the other Western hostages, but to see it all collapse because of bureaucratic infighting within the Obama assistants.

Lt. Col. Jason Amerine was so venerated within the military that the Regular army'due south "Existent Heroes" line had made a literal action figure showing him firing a car gun. A Purple Heart winner, he had also received the Bronze Star for leading the elite team of Us Special Operations Forces that protected Hamid Karzai in the firsthand aftermath of the 9/11 attacks while the future Afghan president worked to cement his political standing within the country.

In his testimony, Amerine said he led a highly secretive group of US troops working to bring back 7 Western hostages held in Transitional islamic state of afghanistan and Pakistan, a group that included both Bergdahl and Caitlan Coleman. The Usa had been talking to the Taliban nearly a and so-called "5-for-i" bandy of the v militants held at Guantanamo Bay for Bergdahl, but Amerine said at that place was a better selection bachelor. Under what he termed the "1-for-7" deal, the US would accept freed a convict Afghan drug lord named Haji Bashir Noorzai for the entire grouping of American and Canadian hostages.

Amerine told the lawmakers that his team was talking to the Noorzai tribe well-nigh the details of the deal and believed they could go the Taliban on lath. So, he said, Washington got involved.

"In the end when the Taliban came to the table, the State Department said it must exist the '5-for-i,'" Amerine said.

Bergdahl was freed; the other hostages were not. Noorzai, a man sometimes called the Pablo Escobar of Afghanistan, is serving his sentence in a loftier-security prison house in California. Coleman, Boyle, and their children remain in Taliban hands.

The Country Section declined to comment.

About one-half of the Americans kidnapped since 2001 take been murdered. That's more than whatsoever other state.

Two weeks after Amerine'southward testimony on Capitol Hill, President Obama held a private meeting with the Foleys and other families of current and sometime hostages. He then took to the podium of the White House's Roosevelt Room and conceded that Washington hadn't been doing enough to bring their loved ones home. That, he said, was about to change.

"These families have already suffered plenty, and they should never experience ignored or victimized by their own government," he said. "I acknowledged to them in individual what I want to say publicly — that information technology is true that there take been times where our government, regardless of adept intentions, has allow them down. I promised them that we can do ameliorate."

Obama then laid out what amounted to the furthest-reaching changes to American earnest policy in decades. The U.s. regime itself would nevertheless not pay ransoms, only Obama said that this administration would no longer threaten to prosecute families who paid money to hostage takers on their own.

Obama also said the U.s. would work to better coordinate its hostage-recovery efforts by creating a "fusion prison cell" within the FBI that would include officials from the State Department, Pentagon, and CIA. The move was meant to ensure that potential deals to free missing Americans didn't autumn between the cracks considering of bureaucratic divisions and rivalries, as happened with the potential agreement to bring Coleman, Boyle, and their children back home.

Families had as well long complained they had no single point of contact within the authorities to attain out to for updates; Obama responded by creating the first presidential special envoy on hostage affairs, a new position housed within the State Department.

"They really did pretty much everything nosotros and the other families had been asking for," Diane Foley said. "It was similar they were trying to make amends."

Still, it's hard to gauge how well the new efforts are paying off. US officials say the fusion cell has helped recover 100 hostages, a quarter of whom were once held by terror groups. That may not be as heartening a statistic as it seems, however. The US won't break down where those hostages had been held; given past history, information technology'southward reasonable to assume that most came from Latin America or Africa, where criminal gangs have spent decades kidnapping Americans but rapidly ransoming them back through intermediaries like Kroll Associates.

Even with the changes, meanwhile, American hostages die in captivity far more frequently than those from other Western countries. In mid-January, a New America Foundation report found that 41 of the ninety hostages murdered by their kidnappers between 2001 and 2016 were Americans. (British captives made upwards the next biggest grouping, with xiv citizens killed past their captors.) In 1 particularly jarring statistic, 14 of the xv Americans taken hostage by ISIS or its shut allies were murdered or died in captivity. Of the sixteen continental European hostages held by the group, by contrast, 14 were released.

"American hostages accept suffered disproportionately bad outcomes compared to other Western hostages," it found.

The report attributed the disparity, in large part, to Washington's "strict adherence" to its policy of not making any concessions to groups property Americans captive. It found that one of the fundamental justifications for that arroyo -- that paying ransoms would encourage groups to nab more than Americans -- doesn't concord up to scrutiny.

"Citizens of countries that make concessions such as ransom payments do non appear to be kidnapped at disproportionately loftier rates," the report found.

There'southward also the open question of whether Trump supports the Obama assistants's hostage-related policies and volition keep them in identify. The fusion cell will survive automatically unless the new president actively dismantles information technology, but Trump would need to engage a new special envoy for hostage affairs and, more broadly, make up one's mind whether to continue subtly encouraging families to endeavour to strike deals with ISIS and other hostage takers on their ain.

Then again, the new president — a human who prides himself on dealmaking and will exist looking for some early PR wins — could also determine to plunge headlong into the example and force per unit area the Afghan and Pakistani governments to complimentary whichever prisoners or make whatever other compromises necessary to bring the family back home. Trump could find a willing partner in the Taliban, who closely follow US politics and might make up one's mind that the early days of a new and unproven administration offer their best opportunity in years to maximize what they would get in exchange for Coleman, Boyle, and their children.

For her part, Diane Foley told me she'due south requested a meeting with Trump or members of his transition team, but hasn't heard back.

Caitlan Coleman'south parents dream of one 24-hour interval belongings their grandchildren. It's not clear if they'll become the chance.

Jim and Lynda Coleman live in a modest farmhouse in the small town of Stewartstown, Pennsylvania, population ii,130. They broke years of near silence in June 2016 with a videotaped message to the Taliban thanking the militants for keeping their daughter and grandchildren alive and begging for their safe return.

"We desperately want to be with and hold our daughter and grandsons," James Coleman said in the video, timed to the Muslim holy calendar month of Ramadan. "As a man, father, and at present grandfather, I am asking you to prove mercy and release my daughter, her husband, and their beautiful children."

1 month afterward, the couple spoke to the online news service Circa News well-nigh the case and shared a letter of the alphabet they'd received from their girl that detailed the birth of her second kid and begged them not to forget her.

"I pray to hear from you lot once again, to hear how everybody is doing," she wrote in a letter dated November 2, 2015, that was besides addressed to her sis, Claire. "Requite my love to each fellow member of the family unit, and share this letter with everyone. Claire, as silly equally information technology sounds, I wish y'all were hither with me. Mom, I'd dearest to hear nearly all your cooking in delicious item."

Caitlan Coleman knitting, from effectually winter 2011.

Courtesy of Coleman family

There has been no public response from the Taliban, who take never been in directly contact with the Coleman family. More than a month afterward the release of the most contempo video, it's non clear if Coleman and her children are any closer to being freed. Jim Coleman told me that it was unsettling and jarring to encounter his grandchildren for the first time on a video released by his family's captors, just was heartened by the fact that his daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren all looked relatively salubrious.

"I thought they looked like a couple of normal, salubrious lilliputian American boys whose faces were dirty because they were messing effectually like trivial boys do," he told me.

The former senior military official has also remained optimistic. He said the Taliban are probably growing weary of having to bear the costs of feeding, housing, and providing medical care to Coleman, Boyle, and their children into the indefinite time to come. He also believes the militants are and so highly attuned to public opinion within and outside of Afghanistan that they're acutely aware of how much their image would suffer if either Coleman or her children were to be hurt or killed while in their custody.

The likeliest scenario, he said, is that one of the family unit gets sick enough that the Taliban announces they're existence released on humanitarian grounds. Alternatively, a group that has for years shown a willingness to deal might finally agree to either a ransom the family could afford to pay or the type of modest political concessions — like the freeing of lower-ranking Taliban prisoners — that the US or Afghan governments would be willing to make.

"This is criminal for them, non political, so they have every incentive to go along the family alive and safe," he said. "There should be a style to strike a deal, but call up of all of the time that'due south been wasted. That's the part that eats at me: Information technology didn't need to elevate on this long. This family unit should take come dwelling house years ago."

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Editors: Jim Tankersley, Lauren Williams
Graphics: Javier Zarracina
Copy editor: Tanya Pai
Video: Yochi Dreazen, Liz Scheltens
Project manager and producer: Susannah Locke

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Source: https://www.vox.com/world/2017/2/6/14213740/taliban-afghanistan-american-hostage-coleman-trump-military-children-isis-terrorism-haqqani-obama

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