Man held hostage by Taliban group didn't believe captors when they told him Donald Trump was President

A man who was held hostage by a Taliban-linked group for five years has said he refused to believe his captors when they told him Donald Trump had become the US President.

Canadian Joshua Boyle, his American wife, Caitlan Coleman, and their children were completely isolated from the outside world while they were held by the Haqqani network in Afghanistan.

The pair were kidnapped in the mountainous Wardak province in October 2012 during a backpacking holiday through Asia while Mrs Coleman was heavily pregnant with their first child.

Their three children were born in captivity and the family endured horrendous treatment at the hands of the group before being freed in a dramatic rescue operation by Pakistani forces last week.

In one of his first interviews since his release, Mr Boyle said the family were starved of any information or entertainment during their years of captivity except for a slate and a piece of chalk.

When Mr Boyle pleaded for some reading materials to alleviate the boredom he said his kidnappers brought the family a pile of dirty washing.

However, while the group were making a proof-of-life video of the family, Mr Boyle said one of his captors told him the reality TV star, Donald Trump, had won the US presidency.

“It didn’t enter my mind that he was being serious,” Mr Boyle told the Toronto Star.

The couple and their children,  Jonah, 4, Noah, 2, and newborn Grace, are now staying with Mr Boyle’s parents in Ontario, Canada, and learning to adapt to their new freedom.

Mr Boyle said the traumas his eldest son Jonah suffered while being held hostage in cells no larger than a bathtub and being abruptly moved from location to location had left him terrified to close his eyes while in captivity.

He said: “Last night [Jonah] 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.

“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” was the term the kidnappers used for their hostages.

Their freedom was secured when the Pakistan army intercepted the kidnappers as they brought the family into the Kurram district of the semi-autonomous tribal belt on Pakistan's Afghan border, following a tip-off from US intelligence.

The Haqqani network, which runs a lucrative kidnapping business in the tribal border regions, is believed to still hold two more US citizens.

Since returning the couple has faced questions about why a husband and his five-month pregnant wife, who is now 31, were in a lawless area of Afghanistan in 2012. Mr Boyle was previously married to the sister of Omar Khadr, a Canadian man who spent 10 years at Guantanamo Bay after being captured in 2002 in a firefight at an Al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan.

Responding to the questions, Mr Boyle said: “I’m a harmless hippie and I do not kill even mice. I’ve been vegetarian for 17 years. Anybody who knows me would laugh at the notion that I went with designs on becoming a combatant.”