IFA staff believes the Lord is pressing on us the vital importance of praying for the children who have been evacuated from Afghanistan. You can read more about in this Headline Prayer article: URGENT PRAYER NEED: 400 AFGHAN ORPHANS AT RISK OF ABUSE. But what was revealed in a hearing Tuesday shocks and underscores the need for intercession–child brides have been brought with older men as refugees. Read on . . . 

Secretary of State Tony Blinken confirmed reports during a Senate hearing on Tuesday that young children were transported from Afghanistan with older men as child brides.

View Comments (3)

During the hearing, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) grilled Blinken about the numbers, citing data form the World Health Organization that over 50 percent of wives in Afghanistan were married as child brides. . .

Cruz cited reports of a State Department document seeking “urgent guidance” from other agencies about the issue after child brides were brought to Fort McCoy in Wisconsin, noting that tens of thousands of Afghans were evacuated from the Kabul airport.

Blinken insisted the entire government was following the issue with “extreme vigilance” to uncover and separate child brides of older Afghan men, but he tried to downplay the numbers.

“To my knowledge, a limited number of cases where we have seperated people because we were concerned…” Blinken began. . . .

“The concern is, we’re seeing a lot of family units with very young girls. These girls are brought into the U.S. as wives,” a government official said to Yahoo News. “It’s not a small number.” (Excerpt from Breitbart. )

Here is the explainer paragraph that accompanies the photo we are using for this article:

BAMIYAN, AFGHANISTAN – OCTOBER 8: Bas Gul (L), 17, resides at a women’s shelter and safe house October 7, 2010 in Bamiyan, Afghanistan. She was a child bride, forced to marry at age 11, and ran away after five years of marriage to the boy, who was only five years old at the time of the marriage. Until women’s shelters were started, something that was unknown here before 2003, a woman in an abusive marriage usually had no one to go to for protection. The problems many battered and abused women are confronting are deeply ingrained in a culture that has mainly been governed by tribal law. Since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, a more concrete idea of women’s rights has begun to take hold, promoted by the newly created Ministry of Women’s Affairs and a small community of women’s advocates. (Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)

The “more concrete idea of women’s rights” that grew in Afghanistan for the last 20 years is most certainly one of the first things to go under Taliban rule in 2021. It does not take much imagination to consider all that will be lost and the dangers now to women who were merely living lives that any human deserves. It must be noted that one Person did more for women than any other in history and His Name is Jesus.  May Afghanistan experience the power of the Gospel. May God give grace, strength, and power to His Church in Afghanistan.