By Maryam Mursal
In early June, when the Taliban captured the Tolak district of Afghanistan’s central Ghor province, Najiba lost both her brother and husband.
The two men, respectively a soldier in the Afghan army and a police officer, were killed in a clash with Taliban insurgents.
The Taliban did not stop at killing her husband. In June, they burned Najiba’s home.
“It is four months that I am homeless, living in a small tent with my two daughters and my elderly parents,” said Najiba, who only goes by one name. She spoke to the Rukhshana Media in a phone interview from her tent in Ferozkoh city, the provincial capital.
“We have nothing to eat and my children are starving,” Najiba said. “I decided to sell my daughters to avoid starvation.”
Najiba is not the only one who is forced to consider the unthinkable. Since the Taliban took over Afghanistan in mid-August, the country is facing a severe economic and humanitarian crisis. The United Nations World Food Program (WFP), describing the situation in Afghanistan as “becoming the world’s largest humanitarian crisis”. On October 25, the WFP warned in a new report that half of Afghanistan’s population, around 23 million are at risk of food insecurity “while 8.7 million face emergency levels of hunger.”
Children are particularly at risk. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan has warned that half of the country’s children under five, an estimated 3.2 million, are expected to suffer severe malnutrition by the end of the year and “without immediate treatment, at least a million are at risk of dying.”
The news of parents who are forced to sell their children and children who died of starvation are surfacing in news reports.
“Eight orphaned siblings have died of starvation in the west of Kabul. The oldest was 11 years old and the youngest was just 3 years old,” said Mohammad Ali Bamyani, a mullah who knows the family.
“Of course, no parents can dare think of selling their children, but what should I do? They are hungry and my parents are sick. I have no choice,” said Najiba, adding that for the past months they have only eaten bread with tea.
“It is better to sell them to someone who can feed them than let them starve in the tent,” she said.
