'My family threatened to stone me to death if I didn't marry man I've never met'

For some teenage girls, getting married is the ultimate dream. But for Saliha Sadath it became a living nightmare.

Last summer she thought she was going on a family holiday to Turkey. But instead of heading to a villa, she says she was taken to Afghanistan to forcibly marry a 30-year-old cousin when she was 17.

When she dared to question the situation, Saliha claims relatives threatened to have her stoned to death. Miraculously, she was able to secretly contact a charity and a lawyer in the UK who helped her escape.

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Back in the UK and having turned 18 a fortnight ago, Saliha today bravely tells her extraordinary story to expose the problem of forced marriages. She said: “I now call myself a forced marriage survivor. I’m very lucky to be alive, I should have been executed.

“I was close to not being here today, it’s very scary to think about. There was no embassy, I had nobody to help me and nowhere to go. I want to raise awareness to make sure other girls don’t go through this.”

Saliha and her family were originally from Afghanistan but she was brought up in the UK. She says life at home in Leicester was tough and accuses her parents of mistreatment. Her only escape was going to college, where she was studying health and social care and began dating a boy.

She said: “I really enjoyed college because it gave me a space away from my parents to feel free and be myself. I’d met a few people and we would hang out together at lunchtime. The college also gave me a support worker who helped me and, if I’d stayed, they were going to support me with a Universal Credit application to allow me to get out of the house.”

Saliha finds the strength to keep going by remembering her late gran. “She always told me, ‘Things will get hard but you must never give up.’ We were really close. She looked after me and taught me things.”

Saliha’s hell began on August 21, 2024, when she left home with her dad Abdullah, mum Bibifathima and seven siblings, and took a Ryanair flight from Luton airport to Istanbul. "I was told we were going on a holiday but I did not feel comfortable about the trip – it was so last-minute, and with only two weeks left until college started, it didn’t make sense to me,” she told us.

“We hired a car at the airport and drove 10 hours to Uzbekistan. We then took a 10-hour train ride, followed by another 10-hour car drive. My parents said we were going to see a monument but when we got close to the Afghanistan border they finally told me the truth – we were going to Afghanistan. I was speechless.”

The family settled in a house in the capital Kabul. After a week relatives began to visit. During a conversation with her cousin Saliha learned she was to marry a man she had never seen.

“They told me, ‘You belong to us’. I didn’t understand what that meant until they said I had been given away in marriage to my cousin. I was in shock. I didn’t want to believe it but they told me preparations for the wedding had begun. When I refused, they threatened me, ‘If you don’t marry him we will say you have committed adultery and we will kill you’. I was told that meant I would be stoned to death unless I agreed to the marriage. I was terrified and felt trapped with no way out.”

Saliha begged a shopkeeper to help her access the internet. Hiding in a toilet, she contacted child protection charities the NSPCC and ChildLine. They referred her to a lawyer who initiated legal proceedings which saw the High Court issue a Forced Marriage Protection Order – a legal tool to protect people like Saliha.

It names her parents and warns they could be imprisoned, or have assets including property seized. The prospect of losing their home appeared to spook the couple, allowing Saliha to slip away to Kabul airport and back to the UK via Turkey.

Since arriving home in February, Saliha has not spoken to her parents, who remain in Afghanistan. International child abduction lawyer Carolina Pedreno, who helped Saliha, said: “Representing a young person in an application for a Forced Marriage Protection Order is always a weighty responsibility, but in this case, the stakes could not be higher.

“Saliha was a very brave and assertive young woman in a situation where any delay or misstep could place her life in grave danger. The challenge was not only navigating complex legal international circumstances but working with the frustration of lack of government representation in Afghanistan and the inability of any agency to help.

“This was the most emotionally demanding case of my career – any delay or misstep could have cost this young woman her life. She was trapped in Afghanistan yet she remained incredibly strong.”

Saliha was in contact with social services over alleged parental abuse before being tricked into going to Afghanistan and blames Leicester City Council’s lack of action for the events that unfolded. “Nobody took me seriously,” she said. “If the authorities and social workers had acted sooner and listened to me properly, this would never have happened.”

But Saliha is positive about the future: “I’m going to go back to college and then I want to join the army. I see it as a career and want to push the boundaries of what is possible for me to do.”

In 2023, the government’s Forced Marriage Unit received 802 contacts related to a possible forced marriage and or female genital mutilation. The true number is likely to be far higher as many victims are too afraid to come forward.

Leicester City Council said: “It would be inappropriate to comment on individual cases.”

Speaking on behalf of her parents, Saliha's sister said: "Me and my family would like to say these are false allegations made by Saliha which were contested in court. We all love Saliha and wish her well, we respect and value her choices."