First, her dreams of becoming a doctor were dashed by the Taliban’s ban on education. Then her family set up a forced marriage to her cousin, a heroin addict. Latifa* felt her future had been snatched away.

“I had two options: to marry an addict and live a life of misery or take my own life,” said the 18-year-old in a phone interview from her home in central Ghor province. “I chose the latter.”

  • I’m not bashing the Guardian, and out of widespread publications I would definitely say they are among the best. My criticism is based on their primary and secondary audiences residing in places whose governments’ actions have rendered them incapable of assisting Afghanistan or its people. As a side note my first exposure to The Daily Mail was when it was being distributed for free at the airport, and it made me so angry I threw it in the trash with much more force than I realized. Awful racist rag.

    Edit: I’m suggesting in my previous comment that Guardian readers are already likely to support refugees or else they would be reading the Sun or the Daily Mail instead.

      • You seem to be enjoying using overly complex sentences, but you don’t actually say anything worth typing.

        And you seem to enjoy adding unnecessary sentences which contribute nothing but malice. This is your reminder to be nice on our instance.

      • Sorry for the sentences, it’s about as much as I can do to keep from writing a single run-on. My concern is specifically with English-language publishing exclusively about issues specifically in Afganistan only now that they are no longer under English-language occupation and have no wish to have us back in any way. For almost two decades you would only hear about Afganistan if we killed someone there and we paid absolutely no mind to any social problems which existed as a consequence of our occupation unless we could credibly blame them on our enemies. Now that the Taliban run things (which are a group originally empowered and radicalized by the US) now we need to pay attention to the social problems when they want nothing to do with us because of literal centuries of bad behavior of specifically the Anglosphere and Russia in their borders. Everything I’ve heard about Afghanistan is that they want us to leave them alone. I think it’s terrible when people face such hopelessness that they feel the need to end their lives, and I’d like to see more reporting on what we can address and less reporting on a part of the world which for very good reason don’t want us involved. I hope this situation can be remediated, but I don’t trust our institutions not to harm them further, and they trust our institutions even less.