Members of the media gather outside the home of Jim and Lyn Coleman, parents of Caitlan Coleman, on Thursday, Oct. 12, 2017, in Stewartstown, Pa. Caitlan Coleman, her Canadian husband and their three young children have been released after years held captive by a group that has ties to the Taliban and is considered a terrorist organization by the United States, U.S. and Pakistani officials said Thursday. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
Members of the media gather outside the home of Jim and Lyn Coleman, parents of Caitlan Coleman, on Thursday, Oct. 12, 2017, in Stewartstown, Pa. Caitlan Coleman, her Canadian husband and their three young children have been released after years held captive by a group that has ties to the Taliban and is considered a terrorist organization by the United States, U.S. and Pakistani officials said Thursday. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke) Credit: Matt Rourke

Washington — Five years after being taken hostage in Afghanistan, an American woman and her Canadian husband are free, along with their three children, all born in captivity. They were released in a dramatic confrontation punctuated by gunfire, officials said on Thursday, though the circumstances were not entirely clear.

U.S. officials said Pakistan accomplished the release of Caitlan Coleman, of Stewartstown, Pa., and her husband, Canadian Joshua Boyle, who were abducted and held by the Haqqani network, which has ties to the Taliban and is considered a terrorist organization by the United States.

Coleman was pregnant when abducted and gave birth to her three children while a captive, officials said.

“Today they are free,” President Donald Trump said in a statement, crediting the U.S. government with securing the release “working in conjunction with the government of Pakistan.”

Trump later praised Pakistan for its willingness to “do more to provide security in the region” and said the release suggests other “countries are starting to respect the United States of America once again.”

The Pakistani military said the family had been freed in “an intelligence-based operation by Pakistan troops” after they’d crossed the border from Afghanistan.

Boyle and the High Commissioner for Pakistan to Canada described a scene in which gunshots rang out as Boyle, his wife and their children were intercepted by Pakistani forces while being transported in the trunk of their captors’ car. Boyle told his parents there’d been a shootout and that the last words he’d heard from the kidnappers were, “kill the hostage,” his father, Patrick, told The Toronto Star after speaking with his son. Three intelligence officials said the confrontation happened near a road crossing in the Nawa Kili area of the district of Kohat in northwest Pakistan.

The high commissioner, Tariq Azim Khan, said, “We know there was a shootout and Pakistan commandos carried out an attack and rescued the hostages.”

The Pakistani military said early Thursday the family was “being repatriated to the country of their origin.”

But as of Thursday midday, the family’s precise whereabouts were unclear, and it was not immediately known when they would return to North America.

The family was not in U.S. custody, though they were together in a safe, undisclosed location in Pakistan, according to a U.S. national security official, who wasn’t authorized to discuss the case publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

A U.S. military official said that a military hostage team had flown to Pakistan on Wednesday, prepared to fly the family out. The team did a preliminary health assessment of the family and had a transport plane ready to go. But sometime after daybreak there, as the family members were walking to the plane, Boyle said he did not want to board.

The release came together rapidly on Wednesday. It happened nearly five years to the day after Coleman and Boyle lost touch with their families while traveling in a mountainous region near the Afghan capital of Kabul.

The couple set off in the summer 2012 for a journey that took them to Russia, the central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and then to Afghanistan. Coleman’s parents last heard from their son-in-law on Oct. 8, 2012, from an internet cafe in what Boyle described as an “unsafe” part of Afghanistan.