SMITHS FALLS, ONT.—During his years as a hostage, 4-year-old Jonah Boyle was terrified to close his eyes. This wasn’t just the protest of a child who didn’t want to nap or go to bed. “Even if you tried to play peekaboo with him, he would scream, he would panic,” said his father, Joshua Boyle.The fear began one evening when the kidnappers transferred Jonah, his younger brother, Noah, and their parents from one prison to another. The boys were asleep, and the guards forced Boyle and his wife, Caitlan Coleman, to leave their sons and get into the car first. Jonah was also asleep until the kidnappers returned. “A bunch of masked men with Kalashnikovs then came into the room — their mother and father aren’t there — and start picking them up and say, ‘Come on, come on, we go in the car,’ pulling him to some place he doesn’t know.”Boyle told this story Saturday not to recount the horror his son endured — but to highlight his recovery. “Last night he wouldn’t close his eyes because he was so excited and he just wanted to sit on his pile of toys with a gigantic smile on his face,” Boyle said. “It took him about three hours to fall asleep, and it wasn’t three hours of panic. It was three hours where he just wanted to really, really cherish this gigantic rabbit and these plastic Lego blocks and these toys, and he wanted to sit there and bask in being ‘no bandi’ after all of this time.”“Bandi” is what the kidnappers called their hostages. Coleman and Boyle would tell their sons hundreds of stories about how life would be once they were free, even as they sometimes lost hope that they ever would be. Read more: Joshua Boyle demands justice from Afghan government after returning to CanadaWhat we know about the rescue of Canadian Joshua Boyle and his family in PakistanA timeline of the captivity of the Boyle-Coleman family in Afghanista ...
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