Taliban terrorists have used their control over Afghanistan's court system to invalidate divorces granted to victims of child marriage, effectively forcing women to marry the men they “married” as children. The BBC revealed this weekend that they are being brought back.
Child marriage has been rampant in Afghanistan for decades, fueled by poverty, and starving families routinely sell their daughters, often 5 or 6 years old, to much older or equally consenting men. Unable to survive, the family sells it to a family with a young son. There is no information regarding the transaction. The U.S.-backed Afghan government, led by former President Ashraf Ghani, who fled the country when the Taliban stormed Kabul in 2021, has launched multiple campaigns to stop child marriages, including those in which one or both parties are children. moved towards annulment of the marriage.
With the Taliban in unchallenged government control, the women and girls who benefited from Ghani-era divorces are unaware that their ex-husbands are resorting to terrorist organizations. The organization confirmed to the BBC that it had annulled the divorce. It did not follow the fundamentalist interpretation of Sharia or Islamic law.
The move joins a long list of abuses against girls and women that the Taliban has systematically committed since 2021, including recently banning women from exposing their faces or speaking in public, and denying them meaningful education. This includes banning hair salons and outlawing hair salons.
BBC published Sunday's report is based on the testimony of a woman identified as 20-year-old Bibi Nazdana, who was married at the age of seven to a man identified as Hekmatullah. Nazdana successfully filed for divorce under Ghani's government, but her husband appealed the divorce in 2021, when the Taliban returned to power, and jihadists ruled in Nazdana's favor. Nazdana could not go to court to contest the appeal because the Taliban prohibits all legal proceedings against women.
Six-year-old Farzana sits in her family's shelter in Regreshan Internally Displaced Persons Camp in Herat Province, Afghanistan, on June 17, 2019. Her father Abdul Nabi sold her for 5,000 Afs (equivalent to $61) to pay off a debt. And to feed my family. The buyer intended to give Farzana to his 13-year-old son as a bride. (Kate Geraghty/Fairfax Media via Getty)
Abdulrahim Rashid, head of communications for the Taliban Supreme Court, told the BBC: “Based on the principles of Islamic law, judicial work requires highly intelligent people, so women are not qualified to be judges. None,” he said.
“The previous corrupt regime's decision to cancel Hekmatullah and Nazdana's marriage was against Islamic law and marriage rules,” Taliban “media official” Abdulwahid Haqqani told the BBC.
The British broadcaster acknowledged that the Taliban had reviewed hundreds of thousands of cases awarded during its outage in Afghanistan, from the start of its “war on terror” in 2001 until the fall of Kabul in 2021. He pointed out. For the Taliban, 30 percent of these are family court cases, suggesting that thousands of child bride divorce judgments have been similarly overturned.
Child marriage in Afghanistan has a long history. The US-based government has paid some attention to the issue, publicly admonishing the sale of daughters to Afghans and presenting the issue as a public health issue.
“People who are under legal age should not get married because they are not capable of bearing pregnancy and their lives are at risk if they become pregnant.” Former First Lady Rula Ghani said “That's why the maternal mortality rate in Afghanistan is so high,” she said at an event during her husband's tenure.
Public action appears to have a small impact on child marriage rates. In 2018, we jointly study A study by the Afghan government and the United Nations found that while rates of child marriage were high, such marriages had fallen by 10 percent in the five years before the study was published.
As a result of President Joe Biden's decision to extend the already 10-year war in Afghanistan beyond the May 2021 withdrawal deadline brokered under his predecessor Donald Trump, the Taliban will be returned to power. The Trump administration's agreement with the Taliban calls for the withdrawal of U.S. forces in May 2021, in exchange for Taliban terrorists not attacking U.S. forces or collaborating with other jihadist groups.
Instead, Biden canceled the deal just before the deadline and instead announced he would withdraw troops by September 2021. In response, the Taliban launched tens of thousands of attacks, prompting the collapse of the now-defunct Afghan army and Mr. Ghani's abrupt abandonment of Kabul. .
According to some reports at the time, the fall of Kabul itself led to an increase in child marriage cases being submitted to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Anonymous CBP agents complained of a bizarre incident in which an Afghan refugee couple, the wife of whom was clearly not an adult, attempted to immigrate to the United States.
“The reality is the vetting process is the worst overseas. There's minimal vetting,” an anonymous source complained to Yahoo News. “So now we have a 60-year-old man with a 12-year-old girl saying, 'That's my wife.'”
In October of the same year, Agence France-Presse (AFP) exposed the case of a man who sold an 18-month-old infant as a bride. The man also sold his eldest daughter, who was 6 years old, claiming that he had no food and it was a necessary step to avoid starvation.
“My husband told me that if I didn't hand over my daughters, we would all die because there would be nothing to eat,” the girls' mother, Fahima, told AFP. The girls were sold to families with young boys arranged as grooms.
Research published by multiple UN agencies in May 2024 Estimation If the Taliban returned to power, child marriage among Afghan girls would increase by 25 percent. As a result, early births will increase by 45% and maternal mortality rates will increase by 50%. According to To Afghanistan Toro News Network.
