Afghanistan Under Pressure

Afghanistan’s economic lifelines have been severed since mid-August when the Taliban assumed control after American and allied forces departed. Billions of dollars in central bank assets have been frozen, banks are running out of cash and wages have gone unpaid for months.

Even before the Taliban took over, hunger was rife in the impoverished country, and now young girls are paying the price with their bodies and their lives

Now, aid agencies and rights groups including Human Rights Watch are warning that the country’s poorest people are facing a famine as the brutally cold winter takes hold.

More than half of the country’s roughly 39 million population will face emergency levels of acute hunger by March, according to a recent report by IPC, which assesses food insecurity. The report estimates that more than 3 million children under the age of five are already suffering acute malnutrition.

“The international community is turning its back as the country teeters on the precipice of man-made catastrophe,” said Dominik Stillhart, director of operations for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), who just returned from a six-day visit to Afghanistan.

Even before the Taliban took over, hunger was rife in the impoverished country, and now young girls are paying the price with their bodies and their lives.

“Afghan young girls (are) becoming the price of food,” leading Afghan women’s rights activist Mahbouba Seraj told CNN. “Because otherwise their family will starve.”

Even though marriage under the age of 15 is illegal nationwide, it has been commonly practiced for years, especially in more rural parts of Afghanistan. And the situation has deteriorated since August, as families become more desperate.

“Usually there is a lot of misery, there is a lot of mistreatment, there is a lot of abuse involved in these things,” Seraj said, adding that some girls forced into marriage die during childbirth because their bodies are too small to cope. “Some of them can’t take it. They mostly die pretty young.”

Women have long been treated as second-class citizens in Afghanistan, which was ranked as the worst country in the world for women in the 2021 Women, Peace and Security Index.

And since the Taliban took over, many of the basic rights that women had fought for over the past two decades have been stripped away.

Limits have been imposed on girls’ education, women are banned from certain workplaces and actresses can no longer appear in TV dramas.