By RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi
October 9, 2026
Desperate to repay her mounting debts and feed her children, Zahira was forced to make a drastic decision.
The mother of two from Afghanistan sold one of her kidneys on the black market last year. Even then, the decision did not lift her family out of crushing poverty, and she is now grappling with the health consequences.
“I sold my kidney out of sheer desperation,” Zahira told RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi. “We had nothing left, and we were drowning in debt. There was simply no other option. Now, my remaining kidney is starting to fail.”
She is not alone. Across the war-torn country of some 40 million people, impoverished Afghans are selling their organs, especially kidneys, to stave off starvation. Most people can survive with just one kidney.
The Taliban’s seizure of power in 2021 worsened one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises. Without foreign assistance, the Afghan economy has further shrunk as joblessness and poverty rise. Millions of Afghans rely on food aid, with aid agencies warning of growing malnutrition.
Some of Afghanistan’s most vulnerable people have resorted to extreme measures to feed their families, including selling organs and, in some cases, their children.
Battling To Survive
Zahira — who lives in the western province of Herat and like many Afghans only uses one name — said she sold her kidney for 100,000 afghanis ($1,550). After paying off part of the family’s debts, she said, “all the money was gone.”
The 35-year-old’s husband is elderly and unable to work. Her 16-year-old son crossed illegally into neighboring Iran, where he is trying to find a job. That has left Zahira as the family’s sole breadwinner.
“Now it’s just me and my two daughters at home,” said Zahira, who does odd cleaning jobs to pay for their single meal a day.
Bismillah, a resident of the neighboring province of Farah, said he tried but failed to sell one of his kidneys.
“My options are to sell my child, commit suicide, or steal,” Bismillah told Radio Azadi, adding that he regularly leaves his village to find labor jobs in the provincial capital, Farah city.
“I went for five days looking for work and found nothing,” he said. “I’ve been sitting at home for six months. Even if we try to cross into Iran, we just get deported back.”
Hundreds of thousands of Afghans have crossed illegally into neighboring Iran to escape extreme poverty and the Taliban’s repressive rule since 2021. But Iran’s ongoing war with the United States and Israel as well as Tehran’s intensifying deportations of undocumented Afghans has left that door increasingly closed to many.
‘One-Kidney Village’
Afghans often sell their kidneys through illegal organ-trafficking networks. Local middlemen identify people willing to sell a kidney and match their blood type with buyers, most of them wealthy Afghans or medical tourists from Iran, Pakistan, and the Arab Gulf states.
The middlemen often take a substantial share of the proceeds, leaving sellers with only a fraction of the agreed price, according to Sayed Ashraf Sadat, an official in the ousted Western-backed Afghan government who was tasked with investigating the illicit organ trade.
Sellers typically receive “only 20 to 30 percent of the actual value of the organ,” said Sadat, adding that the rest is “skimmed off by middlemen and brokers capitalizing on their desperation.”
Operations are often carried out in private hospitals or underground clinics, with corrupt medical staff turning a blind eye.
In Herat Province, the practice has become so widespread that a settlement was nicknamed “one-kidney village.”
In an apparent response to the booming organ trade in Afghanistan, the Taliban in 2024 banned the sale and purchase of human organs as well as organ transplants. The militant Islamist group said that the transplant of vital organs like the heart, kidneys, and lungs was “un-Islamic.”
The move angered patients and doctors, who said thousands of Afghan patients who need transplants for medical reasons would be impacted.
Organ transplants are widely used as medical treatment around the world, including in Islamic countries.
‘No Way To Live’
There are no figures for the number of kidneys sold illegally in Afghanistan. But there has been an uptick in reported cases since the Taliban’s takeover, which triggered an economic collapse and worsened an already dire humanitarian disaster.
Around 14 million people, or one-in-three Afghans, face acute hunger, according to the United Nations, which said child malnutrition has reached record levels in 12 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.
The UN World Food Program said in August that conflict, widespread unemployment, soaring food prices, shrinking humanitarian funding, and disruption to supply routes were fueling the hunger crisis.
Abdullah, a tribal elder in the northwestern province of Badghis, said locals are selling their organs “out of sheer ruin and poverty.”
“May God have mercy and open some door of relief because this is no way to live,” he told Radio Azadi.
Gul Ahmad, an elderly father, said he is considering selling one of his son’s kidneys to feed the entire family.
“What has this world come to when a man is willing to sell his own son’s kidney and can’t even find a buyer? We are all starving,” he told Radio Azadi.
“What choice do I have? There is no aid, no assets, and no work. Where am I supposed to turn?”
Written by Frud Bezhan based on reporting by RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi