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He has seen many fathers sell their daughters, including his own brother. "As a mother, my heart is broken, but I have to save my sons," she explained.Ĭamp elder Abdul Rahim Akbar does what he can to save his neighbours from having to make the awful choice, distributing a small ration of bread to the poorest families. The children are black with filth, living in a ragged tent. Her 11-year-old boy earns 50 cents a day working for a baker, her nine-year-old picks up trash for 30. Rabia would refund the 550 dollars she received for Habibeh's hand if she could afford to feed the rest of her family.
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"I want to stay with my mother," whispered the skinny child. Her daughter, Habibeh, has turned 12 and should have gone to join her future spouse's family a month ago, but she begged them for another year together. Rabia, a 43-year-old widow, has done everything to push back the fateful day. The mothers' grief is long and open-ended: the hard decision to bargain away a child, the months or years waiting for her departure, then the pain of separation. "Some days I go crazy," his wife Dad Gul said, "I leave the tent and I don't really know where I'm going." "My daughters are surely better off over there, with food to eat," he reasoned, trying to console himself as he showed AFP the crusts of bread his neighbours spared for him.Īssan's wife is sick and he has medical bills to pay, so he has already begun looking for a suitor for his remaining four-year-old daughter. Like many others, Assan and his family sought shelter in the temporary camp during the fierce fighting in recent years as the now victorious Taliban clawed back control of the country from the US-backed government. "We didn't want to do that, but we had to feed our other children."
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In another Qala-i-Naw camp, Mohammad Assan wiped back his tears as he showed AFP photos of his girls, Siana, nine, and Edi Gul, six, now living far away with their young grooms. "We know it's not right, but we don't have the choice," commented Hayatullah, a passer-by who overheard the mother's sad tale. The young man is away in nearby Iran, and she dreads the day of his return. Her own daughter Asho, aged eight or nine, is betrothed to a 23-year-old man to whose family Gul Bibi was indebted. "If this continues, we'll have to give up our three-month-old," she said, sitting by the iron cradle holding the sleeping infant, as the first chills of winter penetrated the bleak camp.Īnother neighbour, Gul Bibi, confirmed that many families in the camp had resorted to child marriage. "I'm not happy to have done that, but we had nothing to eat or drink," Sabehreh told AFP.
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The infants are ignorant of their future fate, the shopkeeper having elected to wait until the pair are older before taking charge of the girl's upkeep. To cover the debt, the family agreed that their three-year-old daughter, Zakereh, would be betrothed to the grocer's four-year-old son, Zabiuallah. The business owner warned that they would be jailed if they could not repay him. Village and displaced people's camp leaders say the numbers of young girls getting betrothed started to rise during a 2018 famine and surged this year when the rains failed once more.Īmong farmers driven from their homes, AFP journalists quickly found more than a dozen families who felt forced to sell their daughters into marriage.įahima's 25-year-old neighbour in the camp, Sabehreh, ran up a bill at a grocer's shop to feed her family. In Qala-i-Naw, capital of the western province of Badghis - one of the regions worst affected by the drought - there is shame and grief. The World Food Program warned Monday that more than half the population of Afghanistan, around 22.8 million people, will face acute food insecurity from November.
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