Afghans arrange marriages for toddler brides

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'The other family's property'
Many engaged couples do not meet until after they are married. In some cases, two pregnant women — either sisters or good friends — agree to make a match if one has a boy and the other a girl.

Girls from fatherless families — there are many in war-torn Afghanistan — often are forced into the worst engagements. Jamila Zafar, a social worker for rights group Women for Afghan Women, says it took 2 1/2 months of negotiations to free 14-year-old Mudira in Paghman province outside Kabul from her engagement.

Mudira had lost her father, and her uncle forced the girl into an engagement with his son, a handicapped amputee. When the son died, the uncle engaged her for a second time to another handicapped son.

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When Zafar's colleagues talked with the uncle and his family, the relatives threatened to kill them and went to Mudira's house to beat her stepfather. Only under pressure from Paghman police and officials was the engagement called off.

It is nearly impossible to break engagements "because you're considered the other family's property. You're theirs now. You've been given away," said Manizha Naderi, director of Women for Afghan Women. "It's obviously barbaric. It's going to take generations to change this custom."

Trapped in the marriages
One 22-year-old woman from Kabul has tried to break off her engagement for eight years. Her 36-year-old fiance — whom she describes as uneducated, conservative and cruel, "like a Taliban" — has threatened to kill her if she refuses him. His father has also beaten her.

"I have told my mother for eight years that I don't accept this man," the engaged woman said, asking that her name be withheld for fear his family would attack her. "My mother said, 'What can I do? You don't have any brothers, you don't have a father.'"

Her father died in a car accident when she was 6 months old, so a close friend of her father took it upon himself to find her an appropriate husband — his son.

She is educated and works for a prominent international organization. Her fiance is a tailor with a high school diploma.

"I'm young. I want to go to school," she said, at a coffee shop in a Kabul shopping mall. Her voice was full of desperation and resignation.

"This is Afghanistan. That's why I don't like Afghanistan. I will leave Afghanistan."

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