Human Trafficking in Afghanistan: Forms, Risks, and Survivor Protection

Human trafficking in Afghanistan operates with almost total impunity. The U.S. State Department placed the country at Tier 3 — its lowest ranking — in the 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report, meaning the governing authorities neither meet minimum standards for eliminating trafficking nor are making significant efforts to do so. For a third consecutive year, the Taliban reported no investigations, no prosecutions, and no convictions for trafficking crimes. It identified zero victims and provided no victim services.¹ Economic collapse, mass displacement, and the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021 have deepened conditions in which forced labor, sexual exploitation, child soldiering, and forced marriage thrive.

The Main Forms Trafficking Takes

Trafficking in Afghanistan is not a single phenomenon. Four patterns dominate, each driven by its own economic and cultural pressures.

Debt Bondage and Forced Labor

Entire families are trapped in servitude, most visibly in the brick kiln industry around Kabul and in southeastern provinces. Workers accept an advance payment and then find they can never earn enough to repay it. Children as young as five work in these kilns, sometimes ten to fifteen hours a day with no shelter, stacking and carrying bricks in extreme heat. Debts are frequently passed to the next generation, creating cycles of bondage that span decades.² Forced labor also runs through carpet weaving, agriculture, street begging, and work as assistant truck drivers.

Bacha Bazi and Sexual Exploitation

Bacha bazi is a practice in which men exploit young boys for social and sexual entertainment. The Taliban officially banned it, but the practice has continued, and observers report that Taliban members are in some cases the perpetrators. Victims often do not report their exploitation out of fear of punishment and social stigma.¹ Women and girls are also subjected to commercial sexual exploitation, often after being sold or kidnapped. Those trafficked to Pakistan and Iran face particularly high rates of sexual exploitation.³

Forced and Child Marriage

Forced marriage functions as a trafficking mechanism, particularly for girls. Families facing extreme poverty or debt sell daughters into marriage in exchange for dowry payments or to settle obligations to drug traffickers. Some families with large drug-related debts sell children to traffickers who force them into indentured servitude or marry off underage daughters.¹ Once married, these women and girls are frequently exploited in domestic servitude or compelled into commercial sex by their husbands. Taliban restrictions on women’s movement, employment, and education have dramatically increased this vulnerability by eliminating other survival options.³

Child Soldiers

The 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report found a pattern of recruiting and employing child soldiers in Afghanistan.¹ The Taliban has recruited boys, some as young as twelve, into support roles and security forces. Typical recruits are between 14 and 17, and an estimated 97 percent join the Taliban’s security apparatus.² The Taliban denies recruiting children, pointing to a code of conduct that prohibits boys without facial hair on battlefields or military bases, but observers have documented cases of ages being falsified on identification cards to get around that policy. Growing poverty acts as a recruitment tool, as families who cannot feed their children see few alternatives.

Who Faces the Greatest Risk

Children bear the heaviest burden. They are trafficked into virtually every form of exploitation that exists in Afghanistan: brick kilns, carpet weaving, drug production and smuggling, sexual abuse, begging, and armed conflict. Boys face particular danger from bacha bazi and forced recruitment. Children predominantly between 13 and 18 are also forced by their families to migrate unaccompanied to Iran, Pakistan, or Turkey to earn money, exposing them to exploitation along the way.³

Women and girls face compounding vulnerabilities. The Taliban’s elimination of female education beyond the sixth grade, its bans on most female employment, and its extreme restrictions on movement have stripped away any independent economic capacity. That leaves women almost entirely dependent on male relatives, and when those relatives are the ones selling them into marriage or servitude, there is nowhere to turn. Afghan women and girls sold in Afghanistan, India, Iran, and Pakistan are exploited in sex trafficking and domestic servitude by their new husbands.³

Displaced people are another concentrated risk group. By 2021, roughly 15 percent of the Afghan population had been displaced internally or across borders, with over three million people internally displaced. Traffickers approach refugees and internally displaced people in transit locations and informal camps, offering fraudulent jobs or dangerous smuggling services. Some displaced people have been kidnapped and tortured for ransom or sold to traffickers by their own smugglers. Along migration routes toward Iran and Pakistan, the absence of legal status leaves workers unable to report abuse without risking deportation. The Taliban’s obstruction of NGO operations has further thinned the safety net.¹ Ethnic and religious minorities and returnees deported from neighboring countries, arriving with no assets or documentation, face similar heightened exposure.

Why Victims Rarely Get Help

Trafficking victims in Afghanistan are routinely prosecuted for “moral crimes” that are the direct result of their exploitation. A woman forced into commercial sex may be charged with adultery. A girl who flees a forced marriage may be arrested for running away. The 2015 Trafficking in Persons Report found that victims were routinely prosecuted and convicted while the government failed to hold the vast majority of traffickers accountable.⁴

Under the Taliban, the pattern has deepened. Child victims of bacha bazi and child soldiers have been treated as criminals, housed in juvenile detention centers and subjected to physical abuse rather than referred to victim services.² The Taliban did not identify or protect any trafficking victims during the 2025 reporting period and provided no services.¹ When the system punishes victims, people have no reason to come forward, and enforcement collapses.

What Happened to the Anti-Trafficking Laws

Afghanistan did build a formal anti-trafficking framework before 2021. The Law on the Campaign Against Abduction and Human Trafficking, published in 2008, was the first dedicated statute, carrying sentences of up to eight years, rising to at least twelve when the victim was a child or a woman.⁵ The 2018 Penal Code expanded that framework, criminalizing both sex and labor trafficking, including bacha bazi, with penalties scaling up to thirty years in the most serious cases.⁶

Those laws have effectively become dead letters. The Taliban announced it would review all existing criminal laws and keep only those consistent with its interpretation of sharia. For multiple consecutive years, it did not confirm whether any pre-2021 trafficking statutes remained in force. Observers report that the Taliban has purported to revoke Afghanistan’s constitution and criminal code, including all laws protecting children, and that lawyers are prohibited from even referencing the former penal code in court.³

The Taliban did issue a formal decree directing its ministries to investigate trafficking crimes and conduct public awareness activities. The gap between decree and action is enormous. The Ministry of Interior claimed 300 trafficker arrests over three years but offered no details to verify the claim.¹ Enforcement also varies widely across the country, with local Taliban leaders frequently issuing their own edicts independent of any centralized policy.³

What the U.S. Can Do From Outside

Tier 3 status under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act triggers restrictions on nonhumanitarian, nontrade-related foreign assistance to governments that fail to meet minimum standards. Funding at risk includes assistance under the Foreign Assistance Act, arms sales and financing under the Arms Export Control Act, educational and cultural exchange funding, and loans from multilateral development banks and the International Monetary Fund. The President may waive restrictions when continuing assistance would promote the purposes of the TVPA or when cutting aid would cause significant harm to vulnerable populations like women and children.

Executive Order 13818, issued under the Global Magnitsky framework, provides a separate tool. It allows the U.S. to freeze all property within U.S. jurisdiction belonging to foreign persons determined responsible for or complicit in serious human rights abuse, including trafficking. Blocked property may not be transferred, paid, exported, or otherwise dealt in.⁷ That makes it possible to target individual traffickers and complicit officials with financial sanctions even when Afghanistan’s own justice system is nonfunctional.

Protection for Survivors Who Reach the United States

Afghan trafficking survivors who are physically in the United States may qualify for T nonimmigrant status, a temporary immigration benefit allowing victims of severe trafficking to remain for an initial period of up to four years. To qualify, a person must be present in the U.S. because of the trafficking, must have complied with reasonable law enforcement requests for assistance, and must show that removal would cause extreme hardship involving unusual and severe harm.⁸

Applicants under 18 at the time of the trafficking, or those unable to cooperate due to physical or psychological trauma, are exempt from the law enforcement cooperation requirement. There are no filing fees, including through the adjustment of status stage. Application information is confidential by law, and the government may not deny an application based solely on evidence provided by the trafficker. Certain eligible family members may also receive derivative T status.⁸ This status is only available to survivors who reach U.S. soil; it is not a route out of Afghanistan.

1
U.S. Department of State. 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report – Afghanistan
2
U.S. Department of Labor. 2023 Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor – Afghanistan
3
U.S. Department of State. 2024 Trafficking in Persons Report – Afghanistan
4
U.S. Department of State. 2015 Trafficking in Persons Report – Afghanistan
5
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Law on the Campaign Against Abduction and Human Trafficking
6
U.S. Department of State. 2018 Trafficking in Persons Report – Afghanistan
7
The American Presidency Project. Executive Order 13818 – Blocking the Property of Persons Involved in Serious Human Rights Abuse or Corruption
8
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Victims of Human Trafficking – T Nonimmigrant Status