6-year-old Afghan girl forced to marry man 45, as Taliban greenlights child bride culture

In a harrowing reflection of Afghanistan's accelerating descent into gender apartheid, a 45-year-old man has “married” a six-year-old girl in Helmand province—while the ruling Taliban, rather than annulling the arrangement, advised him to wait until the child turns nine before taking her home.

The case, first reported by US-based Afghan outlet Amu.tv, has provoked international outrage. However, in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan—where there is no minimum legal age for marriage—the so-called union stands.

According to Hasht-e Subh Daily, the man, already husband to two women, paid the girl’s impoverished family for her hand in marriage. A ceremony was held in Marjah district. Both the child's father and the groom were briefly detained, but neither has been charged.

Despite the Taliban expressing public “horror” at the image of the child bride, their intervention stopped short of justice. Instead, they reportedly permitted the marriage to proceed once the girl reaches nine—a chilling echo of extremist interpretations of religious law.

Since seizing power in 2021, the Taliban regime has systemically erased women and girls from public life. The collapse of legal protections has triggered a spike in early and forced marriages. UN Women reported a 25% increase in child marriages and a 45% rise in childbearing since girls were banned from schools and most jobs. UNICEF ranks Afghanistan among the nations with the highest number of child brides.

The International Criminal Court recently issued arrest warrants for two of the regime’s most powerful figures—Supreme Leader Haibatullah Akhundzada and Chief Justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani—accusing them of crimes against humanity for their persecution of women and girls.

The Taliban dismissed the charges, claiming the ICC has no jurisdiction and calling the move “an insult to the beliefs of Muslims.”

But advocates say the evidence is undeniable.

“These marriages are acts of violence, not tradition,” said one rights activist. “They destroy lives before they begin.”

In rural provinces, girls are routinely sold for walwar — a bride price calculated based on appearance, health, or perceived purity. Others are handed over as baad, given to rival families to settle blood feuds. In either case, they become namus — honor-bound property of their husband’s family, with no autonomy and no escape.

“I knew she was too young,” said Amiri, a mother from Uruzgan who married off her 14-year-old daughter to a 27-year-old man for 300,000 Afghanis. “But we had nothing. I used the money to feed my family.”

The Taliban has not reinstated Afghanistan’s previous civil code, which set the legal marriage age at 16 for girls. Instead, clerics use Hanafi jurisprudence, which deems a girl eligible for marriage once she reaches puberty — a concept that, in practice, is now being warped to justify unions involving children as young as six.

Meanwhile, the regime’s brutal gender restrictions deepen the crisis. Girls are barred from high school, universities, gyms, and parks. Women can’t work, travel alone, or show their faces in public. A spokesperson last year defended the veil mandate by stating: “A woman loses her value if her face is seen by men.”

For Afghanistan’s girls, the future is shrinking — swallowed by a regime that treats them as commodities, not children. In the words of Mahbob, a grassroots activist: “People are desperate. No one helps these girls. No one comes.”