Across Afghanistan, fathers are making a choice no parent should face: sell a daughter, or watch the family starve. Driven to the edge by a catastrophic aid collapse, mass unemployment, and a Taliban government that bars women and girls from education and work, families in some of the country’s most isolated provinces are turning to child marriage as a last resort.

Meanwhile, the Taliban recently removed minimum age restrictions on marriage and claims “silence is consent” effectively legitimizing forced marriage.

“I’m willing to sell my daughters”

Ghor province is one of Afghanistan’s hardest-hit regions, where men gather at dawn hoping for a single day’s work. Most leave empty-handed. For some, desperation has already forced the unthinkable.

Abdul Rashid Azimi wept as he explained his situation to the BBC:

I’m willing to sell my daughters. I’m poor, in debt and helpless.

I come home from work with parched lips, hungry, thirsty, distressed and confused. My children come to me saying ‘Baba, give us some bread’. But what can I give? Where is the work?

He held his seven-year-old twin girls close as he spoke—knowing he may not be able to keep them much longer. He told the BBC he could sell them for marriage or domestic work.

If I sell one daughter, I could feed the rest of my children for at least four years.

Saeed Ahmad has already crossed that line. When his five-year-old daughter Shaiqa needed emergency surgery, he had no money to pay for it. So, he sold her to a relative for 200,000 Afghani ($3,200; £2,400). She will go to live with her buyer’s family at age ten, as a future daughter-in-law. He shared:

If I had money, I would never have taken this decision, … But then I thought, what if she dies without the surgery?

Shaiqa is alive. But her freedom is already gone.

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