The consequences of a swift and abrupt Taliban takeover have been disastrous for the common folk in Afghanistan. Following Ashraf Ghani’s hasty departure in the wake of the Taliban advance to Kabul, the international community froze Afghanistan’s assets abroad and halted all the funding that propped up the economy, unwilling to work with the Afghan Taliban given their reputation of brutality during their previous rule two decades ago.
Afghanistan’s economy is in a downward spiral – in the last four months of the Taliban takeover, the economy has contracted by a third. Legions of state employees, including doctors, have not been paid in months. The country is stalked by a famine and aid groups argue that more than half the country is facing acute food shortages. The poor, unfortunate Afghan people – who form the majority of Afghanistan’s population – have now resorted to selling their children to meet ends.
Arranging marriages of young girls is a very common practice in Afghanistan. The groom’s family pays money to the bride’s family to seal the deal, but the child is allowed to stay with her family until she is 15 or years of age. But now that many find it hard to eke out a one-time meal, many families are willing to allow prospective grooms to take very young girls and some have even tried selling their sons.
Buying boys are less common than the girls, but when it does happen, it is mostly families without sons buying the infants.
The World Food Programme estimates that more than half the population of the country, 22.8 million, are facing an acute food shortage, including the hundreds of thousands who have been displaced by the Taliban’s country-wide advance.
“Humanitarian catastrophe awaits the people of Afghanistan this winter unless the global community makes their lives a priority,” said WFP’s regional deputy director for Asia and the Pacific Anthea Webb at a briefing at the UN in Geneva earlier in August, just a few days after the Taliban takeover. WFP argues that it needs at least $200million to feed the Afghan people facing food shortage through this winter.