Sima is 18 and has already given birth four times. Her youngest is a newborn; the eldest is four. Sitting in a mud-brick room in Badghis province, she recounts how, two months after the Taliban takeover, her father beat her until she agreed to marry her cousin. She was 13. Now she fetches water, tends cows, bakes naan, and feels like a 70-year-old. One of her children died of pneumonia at age one.

Sima’s case is no longer exceptional. At one public hospital in northern Afghanistan, 42 underage girls gave birth in the first five months of this year alone. Six were on their second pregnancy, five had ectopic pregnancies, and two died. The trend is driven by Taliban policies that legalize child marriage, force girls out of school, and deepen a humanitarian crisis where families sell daughters to pay debts or buy food. The Guardian and Zan Times spoke to three families with daughters under nine traded in marriage to settle debts; the youngest was two months old when promised, to be handed over between ages seven and nine.

Globally, “underage” means under 18, per the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The World Health Organization warns against pregnancy below 20. Yet Shabnam, a midwife, says child mothers have surged since the Taliban took power. She recalls a 13-year-old who miscarried with severe bleeding; the mother’s response: “To feed my other children, I had to sacrifice one of them.”

Afghanistan’s maternal mortality rate is 600 per 100,000 live births, compared with 16 in Iran and 12 in the UK, per a June UN report. Since the Taliban banned girls from education above sixth grade, over 2.2 million have been barred from school. One teacher estimated 70% of those girls were forced into marriage; a smaller survey found 66% were under 18. A new decree this year set no minimum marriage age, replacing pre-Taliban laws that criminalized marriage under 15.

Sima’s husband is unemployed; five families share one compound in Badghis. “Most of the time, we are hungry,” she says. Her family used her to settle a 200,000 afghani debt with her uncle. A recent UN Development Programme report shows 75% of Afghanistan’s population - about 28 million people - cannot afford basic needs, and over 80% of households are in debt. International aid fell by more than 16% in 2025, closing hundreds of clinics.

Other families interviewed echo the same grim math. Golnar, 57, holds her one-year-old granddaughter, sold for 200,000 afghani to clear her father’s debt. “When she turns eight, they will take her from us,” she says. Saheb Jan, 51, pledged her granddaughter at two months old, to be handed over at seven. Sabza, 44, sold her daughter at age three for 300,000 afghani; she is now distraught that the girl will be taken within a year. “If there were someone to give us this money, I would be so happy,” she says. Her other children keep asking where their sister went.