Abdul Rashid Azimi, a father in Ghor province, Afghanistan, told the BBC he plans to sell one of his twin seven-year-old daughters into marriage, a transaction he says would feed the rest of his children for at least four years. His account, reported by the Daily Mail, is one of at least two cases described in which Afghan fathers have sold or plan to sell young daughters because they cannot afford food or medical care.
The story lands as the United Nations warns that nearly three million Afghans are expected to return to the country by year's end, flooding a nation where three in four people already cannot meet basic daily needs.
This is what collapse looks like. Not in the abstract language of policy briefs, but in the specific arithmetic of a man weighing which of his daughters to give away so the others can eat.
Azimi described his daily reality to the BBC in terms that leave little room for euphemism. He said he comes home from work with parched lips, hungry and confused, only to face children begging for bread he does not have.
"I come home from work with parched lips, hungry, thirsty, distressed and confused. My children come to me saying 'Baba, give us some bread.' But what can I give? Where is the work?"
His twins, Roqia and Rohila, are both seven. He has not said which one he intends to sell. What he has said is blunt: selling one daughter would buy the rest of his family roughly four years of survival.
"If I sell one daughter, I could feed the rest of my children for at least four years. It breaks my heart, but it's the only way."
Azimi is not the only father making this kind of deal. Another Afghan man, Saeed Ahmad, told the BBC he had already sold his five-year-old daughter, Shaiqua, to a relative after the girl developed appendicitis and a cyst on her liver. Ahmad said he had no money for treatment.
The arrangement Ahmad described was structured to delay the worst of it. He asked the relative to pay enough upfront to cover Shaiqua's medical bills, with the balance due over five years, at which point the relative would take her as a daughter-in-law.
"If I had taken the whole sum at that time, he would have taken her away. So I told him just give me enough for her treatment now, and in the next five years you can give me the rest after which you can take her. She will become his daughter-in-law."
Ahmad acknowledged the weight of what he had done. He said underage marriages carry problems, but added that without the sale, his daughter might not have survived at all.
When a father gives his life to save his children, we call it heroism. When a father sells a child to save the others, we are looking at something far darker, not a moral failure in one man, but the total failure of every institution around him.
Hamdullah Fitrat, deputy spokesman for the Taliban government, offered the BBC an explanation that amounted to blaming the previous two decades of Western involvement.
"During the 20 years of invasion, an artificial economy was created due to the influx of US dollars."
"After the end of the invasion, we inherited poverty, hardship, unemployment and other problems."
That framing, "we inherited" the crisis, conveniently sidesteps what the Taliban has done with the country since seizing power in 2021. The regime has placed heavy restrictions on women and girls being allowed to study or work. In a nation where more than half of expected returnees are women and children, barring half the population from economic participation is not a footnote. It is policy-driven starvation.
The Taliban wants to blame the ghost of the American dollar. But the dollars are gone, and the Taliban's own restrictions have made sure nothing fills the gap.
The numbers tell a grim story of their own. Humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan dropped from $1.62 billion in 2024 to $0.91 billion in 2025, a 43.82 percent reduction, according to a report issued this week. The UN says Afghanistan now receives less than 70 percent of the aid it got last year.
The United States, once the largest donor, has slashed nearly all aid to the nation. Other countries, including the United Kingdom, have followed suit.
At the same time, the flow of people back into Afghanistan is accelerating. Since September 2023, some 5.9 million Afghans have returned, mainly from Iran and Pakistan. That figure represents roughly 10 to 12 percent of the entire population. In just the first four months of 2026, about 600,000 returned from those two countries alone.
The UN said on Tuesday it expects the pace to continue, projecting 1.7 million returns from Iran and 1.1 million from Pakistan over the coming eight-month period. That would bring the total expected returnees by year's end to nearly three million.
Tajudeen Oyewale, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Afghanistan, described the challenge these returnees face. Many, he said, have weak or no ties to the communities they are returning to, and more than half are women and children, the very groups the Taliban has systematically excluded from education and employment.
The UN and NGOs are now calling for over $100 million in immediate border response funding for lifesaving assistance at crossing points with Iran and Pakistan. A broader reintegration response for returnees would require $428.5 million, according to the UN report.
Thamindri De Silva, Country Director of World Vision International, put the shortfall in stark terms. The requested border response figure, she said, covers only 40 percent of the most vulnerable returnees, even though 70 percent meet World Vision's vulnerability criteria.
The gap between what is needed and what is available is not closing. It is widening.
There is a reasonable debate to be had about how much American taxpayer money should flow to a country governed by the Taliban. Conservatives rightly questioned the open-ended nature of the twenty-year engagement in Afghanistan, and the chaotic withdrawal in 2021 remains one of the most consequential foreign-policy failures in recent memory. No one is arguing for a return to blank checks.
But the consequences of that withdrawal, and of the political class's habit of moving on once the cameras leave, are now measured in the lives of children. A five-year-old girl sold to cover her hospital bills. A seven-year-old whose father sees her as the only currency he has left.
The Taliban's restrictions on women and girls compound every other failure. When you bar half the population from working and studying, you do not just oppress them, you hollow out the economy for everyone. The fathers selling daughters are living with the downstream results of that ideology.
International organizations can issue reports and request hundreds of millions of dollars. But the structural problem is not a funding gap. It is a regime that treats women as property while blaming foreigners for the poverty it deepens. No amount of humanitarian aid fixes a government that refuses to let its own people participate in their own survival.
The West spent two decades and trillions of dollars in Afghanistan. What it left behind is a country where family bonds fray under impossible pressure and fathers negotiate installment plans for the sale of kindergarten-age girls.
Aid organizations warn that the situation will worsen. With nearly three million Afghans expected to return by year's end, and humanitarian funding cut by nearly 44 percent in a single year, the math gets worse in every direction. More mouths. Less food. Fewer dollars. And a regime that responds to the crisis by pointing at the Americans who left four years ago.
There is no clean answer here. But there is a clear villain: a Taliban government that inherited a broken country and then, through its own ideological choices, made it worse. The consequences of failed leadership always fall hardest on those with the least power to fight back. In Afghanistan, that means girls named Roqia, Rohila, and Shaiqua, too young to understand the deals being struck over their futures.
When a government's answer to hunger is to let fathers sell their daughters, the government is the problem, no matter who it blames.
