‘I’ve already sold my daughters; now, my kidney’: winter in Afghanistan’s slums

It is not uncommon to sell daughters into a future marriage and raise them until they are older, but families are now handing young girls over because they cannot feed them. Photograph: Rukhshana Media

The temperature is dropping to below zero in western Afghanistan and Delaram Rahmati is struggling to find food for her eight children.

Since leaving the family home in the country’s Badghis province four years ago, the Rahmatis have been living in a mud hut with a plastic roof in one of Herat city’s slums. Drought made their village unliveable and the land unworkable. Like an estimated 3.5 million Afghans who have been forced to leave their homes, the Rahmatis now live in a neighbourhood for internally displaced people (IDP).