What were Caitlan Coleman and Joshua Boyle really doing in Afghanistan?

Joshua Boyle and son Jonah play in the garden at his parents house. Photo / AP

In the weeks, months and years after American Caitlan Coleman and Canadian Joshua Boyle went missing in Afghanistan, their families repeated the same story: They were young adventurers, drawn off the beaten track.

"They were interested in cultures that are under-developed," Caitlan's mother Lyn said in 2014. They didn't do things like stay in hotels or visit tourist traps. They were idealists, and also a little naive.

Soon after the pair married in 2011, they spent four months in Guatemala. And in 2012, they jetted off for Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Family members called it a backpacking trek. Afghanistan was not a part of the plan, at least not as far as anyone knew.

But Coleman and Boyle did make their way to a remote area of Afghanistan outside Kabul, where they were kidnapped by the Taleban and later held by the Haqqani network before being rescued last week.

Their captors killed Coleman's infant daughter and allowed Coleman to be raped by a guard, her husband said. The couple and three of their children were rescued in Pakistan, where their captors had taken them from Afghanistan. The operation by the Pakistani military was tipped off by US intelligence. The family arrived in Toronto at the weekend after the five-year ordeal.

Why did Boyle and Coleman, seven months pregnant, decide to go to Kabul? What were they trying to accomplish?

Boyle said he and Coleman went to Afghanistan to try to help "the most neglected minority group in the world, those ordinary villagers who live deep inside Taleban-controlled Afghanistan... where no NGO, no aid worker and no government has ever successfully been able to bring the necessary help." Boyle described himself as a "pilgrim". It's not clear how he and Coleman intended to help, or what they were up to when they were kidnapped.

Coleman's friend suggested to USA Today that she and others had at least a vague notion that the couple intended to do some volunteer work. Sarah Flood said she related to Coleman's travel plans because she had just come back from a service trip to Ukraine. "The idea of going to a country and being helpful is something we absolutely shared," Flood told USA Today. She also said that the trip had been Boyle's idea, but Coleman quickly got excited about it.

The family in a Taleban video. Photo / AP

And then there's the insight of Richard Cronin, who met Coleman and Boyle while they were in Central Asia. The pair befriended Cronin at a hostel in Bishkek. In a blog post from 2012, Cronin wrote that Boyle's excitement about Afghanistan convinced him to go. "I hadn't thought seriously about travelling to Afghanistan until I started talking to Josh," he wrote. "We started talking about Lawrence of Arabia and the explorer Richard Burton. He asked me if I admired these explorers. Of course I did. 'Wouldn't you like to be like one of them?'.He had also said it was safe provided you didn't go to a region where there were foreign troops and the Taleban, namely the south."

After the 9/11 attacks, Boyle became consumed by questions of terrorism and Islam, studying up on the issue and even learning Arabic. A few years later, he got involved in an effort to get Omar Khadr, once the youngest detainee at Guantanamo Bay, released. Khadr pleaded guilty to killing a US Special Forces medic. Boyle briefly married Khadr's sister.

Boyle's associations with the family led some US intelligence officials to speculate that the visit to Afghanistan may have been part of a larger effort to link up with Taleban-affiliated militants. "I can't say that [he was ever al-Qaeda]," said one former US intelligence official. "He was never a fighter on the battlefield. But my belief is that he clearly was interested in getting into it." Authorities denied that Boyle had any ties to terror.

His "first concern in life has always been helping others," Alex Edwards, a friend of Boyle's since 2002, told Philadelphia. "If things were different, and I was the one being held hostage, Josh wouldn't rest until I was free. He'd stage sit-ins. He'd put up posters. He'd dedicate his life to it. That's just who he is."