On his Tuesday podcast, Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro ripped President Biden as stories of forced child marriages emerge from the country Biden abandoned, Afghanistan.
“Remember that time that Joe Biden left Afghanistan in complete tatters and then his people claimed that nothing bad would happen there?” Shapiro began. “Now people are selling their eight-year-old girls into marriage.”
Shapiro referred to a Washington Post opinion piece by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Stephanie Sinclair titled, “In the new Afghanistan, it’s sell your daughter or starve.” Sinclair wrote:
Their names are Khoshbakht, Saliha, Fawzia, Benazir, Farzana and Nazia — Afghan girls ages 8 to 10 who have been sold into marriage. Desperation forced their parents to thrust them into brutal adulthood. In Shahrak-e-Sabz, a settlement of makeshift mud-brick homes and tents for the displaced in Herat province that we visited last month, our researchers counted 118 girls who had been sold as child brides, and 116 families with girls waiting for buyers. This amounts to 40 percent of families surveyed, even though the Taliban decreed in late 2021 that women should not be considered “property” and must consent to marriage.
Sinclair described conditions in Shahrak-e-Sabz as “hellish … set in a vast desert with no shade trees in sight; scant protection from sandstorms and harsh weather; no running water, electricity, heat or work; and only a trickle of aid from the outside world. Most families living here left behind decent lives to escape climate change and conflict. They subsist on stale bread and black tea; many are close to starving.”
Noting that in Afghanistan, child marriages have skyrocketed, Sinclair pointed out that “school is prohibited for girls after the sixth grade,” adding: “Sequestered at home, a girl becomes just another mouth to feed. But as a bride, she’s a valuable commodity. A $2,000 bride price is enough to feed a family for a year.”
Sinclair wrote that the girls’ nightmares in their new in-laws’ homes included “verbal, physical and sexual abuse — slavery under the guise of matrimony.”
“So things are going amazingly well in Afghanistan,” Shapiro commented. “It turns out that Joe Biden’s cowardice actually has real-world consequences. These stories are absolutely horrifying.”
“So Farzana is nine years old. Her mom has seven kids ranging in age from 1 to 15 after the mom’s husband died in a car accident last year,” he noted from the article. “She had to borrow money to survive. And then she was forced to sell Farzana for $4,300. The buyer insists he’s entitled to take Farzana right now. The mom is trying to keep her until she is 18 years old. But the buyer presumably wants Farzana at nine, you would assume, to rape her. That or … treat her as a slave.”
“Joe Biden’s world, ma’am. It’s a great, wonderful, wonderful place,” Shapiro concluded.