The Truth About Opium Brides
What Afghanistan's Heroin Industry Is Costing Women
Article Summary and Author Biography
Bartering girls into marriage to pay off opium debts has become more prevalent in recent years in Afghanistan. Farmers, middlemen in the drug trade, drug couriers, and even some drug lords themselves sell their daughters to more powerful traffickers and smugglers -- and very little is being done to combat the injustice.
FARIBA NAWA is a journalist and the author of Opium Nation: Child Brides, Drug Lords, and One Woman’s Journey Through Afghanistan, and Afghanistan, Inc.
Capsule Review
This book traces the use of opium back to prehistoric times and sketches its complex and interesting history in Europe and especially in Asia, from ancient China and ancient Persia to modern times.
Snapshot
The narcotics trade is ruining Afghanistan and spreading death and addiction around the world. Kabul needs a new approach to the problem -- and neighboring Iran happens to offer a great model.
Afghan women working in a poppy field. (Courtesy Reuters)
In the dusty village of Ghurian on Afghanistan's arid western border, Touraj* had made his life as a shepherd, but in the late 1990s, when a drought brought that livelihood to an end, he became a middleman in the country's lucrative drug business. Touraj's primary job was to hire couriers to carry drugs across the border into Iran. At first, the risk paid off -- he was able to build a two-story house and buy gold jewelry for his wife. For himself, he purchased a motorcycle and a Rado watch. Feeling flush, he even took a girl from the city on as a second wife.
But more recently, after a few deals went bad, Touraj fell into $10,000 worth of debt to smugglers from Helmand Province, the frontline of the NATO counterinsurgency campaign. He was jailed. To buy back his freedom and save the rest of his family, he would sell two of his daughters.
He bartered Darya, 12, and her 14-year-old sister, Saboora, as brides to opium smugglers. The girls were wed without their consent in Helmand -- Touraj and the smugglers performed the Islamic nikah ceremony, which pronounces a man and woman as husband and wife. As it turned out, Saboora escaped her newfound fate: Her husband never showed up to collect. He was presumably killed while on his way; Saboora remained with her family.
Darya's husband, however, did turn up to claim his new bride. Haji Tor was 34 years her elder and had another wife and eight children. He spoke Pashto; she only spoke Dari. For two years, Darya refused to go with him. He was lenient enough to let her stay with her family, although he routinely visited to try to convince her to come with him to Helmand. In 2003, I was in the village researching my book Opium Nation, and after I met Darya, she pleaded for me to somehow free her...
