The slender American woman in the black abaya looks directly at the camera, her two children, their faces caked with dirt, sitting just to her left.
Today is December 3, 2016. We have waited since 2012 for someone to understand our problems, the Kafkaesque nightmare in which we find ourselves, she says in the video released by her captors in Afghanistan late last year. My children have seen their mother defiled. We ask, in our collective 14th year of prison, that the governments on both sides reach some agreement to allow us freedom.
Then, aiming her words squarely at President Obama, she adds one more message.
Your legacy on leaving us is probably important to you as our lives and those of our children are to us, she says, reading from the prepared text in her hands. So please dont become the next Jimmy Carter. Just give the offenders something so they and you can save face and we can leave the region permanently.
The woman is a Pennsylvania resident named Caitlan Coleman, and she, her husband, 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 be in militant hands there. (The family of American writer Paul Overby revealed in January that he has been missing since May 2014, while the Taliban just released a new video of US academic Kevin King and his Australian colleague Timothy Weeks, whom they kidnapped in August 2016, tearfully pleading for their lives.)
We know Colemans name, and we know the name of her husband, Canadian Joshua Boyle. But we dont 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 about 4, is holding on to his brother, thought to be around 2. At one point the older child laughs and smiles at someone off camera, who promptly shushes him.
When we think about US hostages in Afghanistan and Pakistan, many of us think about Bowe Bergdahl, the US 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 most recent season of the popular Serial podcast; during the presidential campaign, Donald Trump called him a dirty 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 decision by an idealistic couple seeking one last big adventure before becoming parents, and continues through years of bureaucratic indecision and infighting by a US government deeply divided over how far to go to try to get them back.
