Joshua Boyle

Joshua Boyle is a Canadian hostage held by the Taliban. He is married to Caitlan Coleman having been married to Zaynab Khadr, sister of Omar Khadr. Coleman is a U.S. citizen who was born in York County, Pennsylvania.

Boyle and Coleman met online and married in 2011. They went missing in 2012 while traveling through Wardak province, a Taliban haven 40 km from Kabul near the Pakistani border. Boyle last contacted family on October 8, 2012 from an internet cafe in an "unsafe part" of Afghanistan. Coleman, who was pregnant at the time, gave birth in captivity and subsequently had a second child. They are held by the Haqqani network. Afghanistan was not part of the original travel plan, according to his parents.

Joshua Boyle is the second of five children of Patrick and Linda Boyle. He attended a Mennonite school and was involved with his mother's "Anglican church and his father’s Catholic faith." He graduated the University of Waterloo.

Boyle had a long standing interest in Islamic terrorism boasting in 2009 that “anything related to terrorism on Wikipedia, I wrote, pretty much.” He took an interest in the Gitmo detainee, Omar Khadr and married Omar's sister Zaynab Khadr in 2009 becoming her third husband. At the time Boyle was a practicing Muslim taking prayer breaks at work at appropriate times. During his marriage to Zaynab, Boyle's parents' Ottawa house was fired upon and ransacked by an intruder but no valuable were taken. Boyle believed it was related to his marriage to "a woman who had ties to Osama bin Laden." He expressed interest in doing humanitarian work in places known to be dangerous.