Source: New York Times
KABUL, Afghanistan — Nine years before an Afghan girl named Soheila was born, her half brother Aminullah eloped with a woman who had been betrothed to his cousin, an event that led to years of violent feuding between two sides of their family in Nuristan.
Soheila’s mother died while giving birth to her. Her father, Rahimullah, then bartered his daughter’s future for family peace, betrothing Soheila at the age of 5 to the aggrieved cousin, a man her father’s own age.
The practice is known as baad, in which young girls are traded between families to resolve disputes. Although illegal, baad is still widely practiced, especially in remote areas of Afghanistan. Once of legal age, 16, Soheila would become the fourth wife of an elderly man.
Fast-forward to late last month, when Soheila, who uses only one name and is now 24, sat in the offices of the advocacy group Women for Afghan Women and for the first time watched her own story unfold on screen.
Wide-eyed, she watched the documentary “To Kill a Sparrow,” a half-hour-long piece by the Iranian filmmaker Zohreh Soleimani that showed Soheila’s long struggle to escape the destiny her father had intended for her.
Much of the documentary, which was filmed over about a year and a half, took place while Soheila was in the women’s shelter run in Kabul by Women for Afghan Women, which is the largest private organization in Afghanistan operating shelters and other facilities for women in crisis. It is where she spent much of the past four years as the group’s lawyers worked to resolve her case.
“I grew up in here,” Soheila said, embarrassed and hiding her face for a moment as she sat between her former social worker and her former lawyer, both W.A.W. employees. “Look how young I was. I was so skinny then.”
“You were too skinny then,” one of the women said, laughing with her.
Soheila discovered her betrothal when she turned 13, and she soon worked out that her white-bearded fiancé would be 67 when she reached age 16. On the eve of her wedding ceremony, she fled to her maternal uncle’s house, but it was clear she would be returned by him in the morning.
In desperation, she begged her cousin Niaz Mohammad, who is a decade or so older than she, to help her escape, and he did. In the course of their flight, the two runaways fell in love and then married each other.
Even though she had escaped with the man she loved, she was not free: Her family members still considered her married to the older man based on the earlier agreement. They pursued her and had her and her new husband thrown in jail, accused of adultery, conceiving a child out of wedlock and bigamy.
The striking thing about the video is the success of Ms. Soleimani in persuading Soheila’s family members to cooperate, and drawing out of them their full-throated justification of practices like baad, and the absolute right of men to determine whom their sisters and daughters should marry.
As Soheila watched the video, she came to the part where her father visits her in prison, and plays in an apparently loving and grandfatherly way with her toddler, Mr. Mohammad’s son, who was born after Soheila and Mr. Mohammad were both imprisoned. Soheila burst into tears, and covered her face with her veil, then peeked out again at the image of her father in a moment of seeming kindness.
She said her father told her that he would accept her home on one condition: “Kill your son.”
As the video continues, Ms. Soleimani interviews both the father and the half brother, Aminullah, whose own long-ago elopement was the offense that led to the bartering of Soheila’s life.
Her father, who lives by traditions that have often been overtaken by laws, at least once seems confused by the goings-on in Kabul, saying for instance that the government keeps Soheila in the shelter and would not let her return to him, even though the government does not run the shelter.
When Soheila saw Aminullah and her father sitting together, explaining themselves in the documentary, she pushed the screen aside and said, “I won’t watch them, I hate them both.”
On camera, both men soon become frankly homicidal toward her.
“Me, or a relative from my tribe, someone will find her — even if she goes to America we will find her,” Rahimullah says. “Wherever she is found, she will be killed.”
He then cites the Quran as justification, and adds a prayer, “God, kill both of them.”
“If she runs away, unh,” adds Aminullah, making a gesture like a finger pulling a trigger. “We are not afraid of dying, we are not afraid of beating, we are not afraid of killing, for us it’s like killing a sparrow. If she is not coming back to us and goes with that donkey of a man, she will be killed.”
There are some happy postproduction addenda to the story in the video. Mr. Mohammad’s case was also resolved by W.A.W., and after four years in prison, he was finally released.
Her divorce from the old man final, Soheila was required by Afghan law to wait four more months before remarrying, but then last month she was released from the shelter and the couple were married formally, in a ceremony with just a few of his family members present.
It is still a long way from a happy ending. Mr. Mohammad contracted hepatitis in prison, and now suffers from diabetes as well; he is jobless and too ill to work. Soheila’s half brother Aminullah often telephones her and threatens her life, she said, although now she records the calls and takes the recordings to the police.
According to officials at Women for Afghan Women, Aminullah’s own daughter eloped recently as well, breaking the engagement that he had made for her when she was only three days old — an engagement he had boasted about on camera. “Yes, three days old: one, two, three,” he said to the incredulous Ms. Soleimani.
“He blames me for all their problems,” Soheila said when interviewed recently, suggesting that her half brother might now be looking for a baad settlement from the family of the man who took his own daughter. “It just goes on and on,” Soheila said, “It will keep going on, until they kill me.”
