Taliban terrorists are using their control over Afghanistan’s court system to invalidate divorces granted to victims of child marriage, the BBC revealed this weekend, effectively forcing women back with men who “married” them when they were children.
Child marriage has been prevalent in Afghanistan for decades, fueled by poverty – starving families routinely sell their daughters, often as young as five or six years old, either to much older men or to families with young sons who are similarly unable to consent and have no information on the deal. The U.S.-backed government of Afghanistan under former President Ashraf Ghani, who fled the country in 2021 when the Taliban stormed Kabul, launched several campaigns discouraging child marriage and moved to annul marriages where one or both of the parties were children.
With the Taliban in uncontested control of the government, women and girls who benefitted from Ghani-era divorces are not finding that their former “husbands” are appealing to the terrorist group, which confirmed to the BBC that it has invalidated divorces it that it found did not comply with its fundamentalist interpretation of sharia, or the Islamic law.
The development is on a long list of abuses against girls and women the Taliban have systematically committed since 2021, including recently banning women from showing their faces or talking in public, prohibiting them from any meaningful education, and outlawing beauty salons.
The BBC published a report on Sunday based on the testimony of a woman identified as Bibi Nazdana, a 20-year-old who was married off to a man identified as Hekmatullah at age seven. Nazdana successfully filed to divorce under the Ghani administration, but her husband appealed the divorce in 2021 – the year the Taliban returned to power – and the jihadists ruled in his favor. Nazdana could not appear in court to challenge the appeal because the Taliban has banned women from all legal proceedings.
Six-year-old Farzana sits in her family’s shelter in the Regreshan IDP camp in Herat Province, Afghanistan, June 17, 2019. Her father, Abdul Nabi, sold her for 5000 Afs, the equivalent of $US61, to pay off a debt and to feed his family. The purchaser intended to give Farzana to his 13-year-old son to be his bride. (Kate Geraghty/Fairfax Media via Getty)
“Women aren’t qualified or able to judge because in our Sharia principles the judiciary work requires people with high intelligence,” Abdulrahim Rashid, a communications head at the Taliban Supreme Court, told the BBC.
“The previous corrupt administration’s decision to cancel Hekmatullah and Nazdana’s marriage was against the Sharia and rules of marriage,” Abdulwahid Haqani, a Taliban “media officer,” told the BBC.
The British broadcaster noted that the Taliban confirmed that it had reviewed hundreds of thousands of cases ruled during the time they were out of power in Afghanistan, between the beginning of the “war on terror” in 2001 to the fall of Kabul in 2021. According to the Taliban, 30 percent of them are family court cases, suggesting that thousands of child bride divorce rulings were similarly overturned.
Child marriage has a long history in Afghanistan. The U.S.-based government paid some attention to the issue, publicly discouraging Afghans to sell off their daughters and presenting it as a public health issue.
“Those who have not reached their legal age should not be married, because they do not have the ability to withstand a pregnancy and it risks their lives;” former First Lady Rula Ghani said at an event during her husband’s tenure, “because of this the maternal mortality level in Afghanistan is quite high.”
The public activism appeared to have a modest effect on child marriage rates. In 2018, a joint study by the Afghan government and the United Nations found high rates of child marriage, but a ten-percent drop in such marriages in the five years prior to the publication of the study.
The Taliban returned to power in 2021 as a result of President Joe Biden deciding to extend the already decade-long Afghan War beyond a May 2021 withdrawal deadline brokered under predecessor Donald Trump. The agreement between the Trump administration and the Taliban required Taliban terrorists not to attack U.S. troops or associate with other jihadist organizations in exchange for U.S. troops leaving the country in May 2021.
Instead, Biden announced shortly before the deadline that he would abandon the deal and instead withdraw troops by September 2021. In response, the Taliban launched tens of thousands of attacks, prompting the collapse of the now-defunct Afghan military and Ghani’s abrupt abandonment of Kabul.
The fall of Kabul, some reports at the time indicated, in itself caused an increase in child marriage cases appearing before U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Anonymous CBP agents complained of strange occurrences in which an Afghan refugee couple in which the “wife” was clearly not of age would attempt to relocate to the United States.
“The reality is, overseas the vetting process sucks. There’s minimal vetting,” an unnamed official complained to Yahoo News. “So now we have a 60-year-old guy with a 12-year-old girl saying, ‘That’s my wife.’”
In October of that year, the Agence France-Presse (AFP) uncovered the case of a man who sold an 18-month-old toddler as a child bride. The man also sold his six-year-old elder daughter, claiming they did not have food and the arrangement was necessary to avoid starvation.
“My husband said if we don’t give away our daughters, we will all die because we don’t have anything to eat,” Fahima, the mother of the girls, told AFP. The girls were sold to families with young boys arranged to be child grooms.
A study by several United Nations agencies published in May 2024 estimated that the Taliban’s return to power would result in an increase of child marriages among Afghan girls of 25 percent. As a result, early childbearing would spike by 45 percent and maternal mortality by 50 percent, according to the Afghan Tolo News network.
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