A man lost his life to protect the welfare of his daughter.
PBS’s harrowing film, “Opium Brides” displayed footage of an Afghan opium farmer being decapitated with a pen knife because he refused to hand over his ten-year-old daughter as a form of debt settlement.
According to CNN, taking an opium farmer’s child as collateral is a tactic often used by the Afghan drug cartels to scare the farmers into paying their debt. Most of the children are sold into the sextrade in nearby Iraq or Pakistan.
In a separate incident, the wife of an opium farmer whose crops were destroyed by NATO forces, was kidnapped, tortured, and filmed by the cartel to persuade his wife to hand over their six-year-old daughter in exchange for his life.
Apparently, the Afghan drug cartels are more ruthless and more dangerous than the Taliban.