Months, Years and Thousands of Afghanis Later… Stories of Afghans battling bureaucracy

Getting a marriage certificate 

Traditionally, when people get married in Afghanistan, they do not get an official government document to certify the marriage. They either get a booklet from the mullah who performed the nikah (marriage), which is similar to an official nikahkhat, with photos of the spouses, their fingerprints and other details, or a more basic document, also from the mullah, that mentions the names of the spouses, the mullah and the amount of mahr, the gift given by the groom to the bride as stipulated in Islamic law.

For decades, successive Afghan governments from the communist era onwards have tried to make the use of marriage certificates mandatory.^[1] Under the Islamic Republic, human rights and women’s rights groups hoped that an official nikahkhat could reduce child and forced marriages (see this 2007 report from the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission) and there were also public awareness campaigns – but to limited effect (see this IWPR report from 2016). This has been echoed anecdotally to AAN, which asked more than a dozen people if they had registered their marriage at the time, and all simply said they did not.

However, since 2021, getting an official certificate – a nikahkhat – seems to have become more common. AAN interviews suggest the change has partly been driven by the surge in out-migration since 2021, with Afghan couples travelling to Europe or regional countries, where they need official documents, including a nikahkhat, or one spouse trying to bring the other to their new home country. A report by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in 2023 found that after the collapse of the Republic, for Afghans seeking to leave the country for various reasons, such as unemployment, poverty and instability, getting documentation – including a nikahkhat and a passport – became a priority. A defence lawyer in Balkh province, Amir Rasuli, gave another reason for the increased demand:

In the past, spouses were content to have [documents from the mullah who conducted the marriage], but recently, the demand for official marriage certificates has increased. Having an official marriage certificate guarantees women’s rights such as nafaqa [financial support, including food, clothes and housing], inheritance and mahr; it specifies the husband’s responsibilities towards his wife. 

However, getting a marriage certificate is not a straightforward process, as Khadija’s story illustrates.

Khadija’s story: the ultimate bureaucratic obstacle – state collapse

Khadija, who is 35 and lives in Kabul with her husband and two daughters, has experience of trying to get a nikahkhat under both the Republic and the current Islamic Emirate government. She began the process under the Republic:

We had a traditional nikahkhat, but then my husband said we should have an official one. He was very busy, so he asked me to take all our ID cards [mine, his and our daughters’] and go to apply for an official nikahkhat.

Khadija did not know where or how to begin:

I knew nothing about the procedure for obtaining a nikahkhat and didn’t even know the address of the court. So, I asked a relative and he told me to go to the court in Jangalak area in PD [police district] 6 … He said, first, I needed to go to a petition writer [ariza nawis] near the court to write an application for me, which I did.

When Khadija took the application to the court, she discovered there were two more steps, involving the religious and local authorities:

[The court] then gave me a form to take to the mullah imam of our mosque and the wakil-e guzar [neighbourhood representative] to confirm that I was living in Charqala-ye Chardi. My family knew the wakil-e guzar and the mullah imam, so it didn’t take much time for them to sign and stamp my form.

After that, Khadija’s relative told her there was yet another step:

I then had to take the form to the relevant municipality district so they could confirm that the wakil-e guzar was active. I didn’t know the address of the municipality office in District Six, so I asked my father-in-law to take it there.

He took her form to the municipality office in Kart-e se, but found out that another piece of documentation was needed:

They asked him to bring the safai [municipal tax] booklet of our house, but my father-in-law told them we lived in a rented house. They said if he could show them an electricity bill, it’d be alright. So he came home, got the last electricity bill and took it back. They accepted that and signed and stamped the form.

Khadija had now completed all the steps and was given a day to come to the court to finalise the document. However, events intervened:

I went to the court and submitted the form. It was so crowded I thought all the residents of Kabul had come to obtain their nikahkhats. A court employee took my application form and dated it and said, “Now your application is dated. You should come in the month of Sunbula [21 August to 20 September].” But then the Taliban came to power in August 2021, almost a month after I got the date for my application. As a result, I couldn’t get my nikahkhat at that time. 

Khadija could do nothing but wait for things to settle. It took a while for the courts to function again and then she tried again to get her nikahkhat:

After a few months, I was informed that the court had reopened and was processing the petitions and applications from the Republic era… The following day, I went to the court, but my name was among those marked ‘absent’ because they hadn’t appeared on the specified date. I talked to someone in the court who advised me to return another day, when they could provide a new date for my application. 

When Khadija returned, she faced more problems, including how soldiers behaved towards clients in the court:

It was 9 o’clock when I arrived at the court. It was very crowded. There were men and women, young and old. Some Taliban soldiers were trying to bring order there, but when they lost their patience, they beat people. I waited in a long line, but when it was my turn to submit my application, they said they wouldn’t collect it now. They told me they collected applications and petitions early in the morning. Around 300 to 400 people were in a line every morning, every day.

Khadija then asked her husband to take a day off work to go in her place:

He went to the court and they dated the application. Then we went to the court on the date to get our nikahkhat. We also brought two witnesses. We paid one thousand afghanis [USD14] and finally got our nikahkhat. It’d taken us nine months in total.

Steps for obtaining a marriage certificate

Drawing on our interviewees’ accounts, we have gleaned that these steps appear to be needed to obtain a nikahkhat:

Step one: Submit a formal petition to your local primary court’s registration department, with photos and IDs of the spouses.

Step two: Fill out a request form, which includes questions about the spouses’ first and last names, their residence and ahleyat (in this context, whether they are adults, of sound mind and in good health) and if there are any obstacles to the marriage. The form requires authorisation from the mosque’s imam, two neighbours, the wakil-e guzar and the district office. It is then returned to the relevant directorate or primary court for further processing.

Step three: Pay the marriage certificate fee using a payment slip provided by the court.

Step four: Return to the court to present two witnesses who can testify to the marriage and provide original IDdocuments, completed registration documents and photos. A return date is set.

Step five: One or both spouses go to the relevant court with their IDs and receive their marriage certificate.

For Afghans needing a nikakhat in Europe, there is an additional step: they must get a translated version, which has to be verified by the qazaya-ye dawlat (Government Affairs Office) in Kabul, or the provincial Department of Justice, and be approved by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Getting this additional layer of approval only makes the whole process even longer and more complicated, as Mansur Ahmadi found out.

Mansur Ahmadi’s story: the problem of being born in one province and moving to another

Mansour Ahmadi, who currently lives in Europe, travelled to Afghanistan in 2022, where he tried to get a nikahkhat. He also had to get an official translation so that the certificate could be used outside Afghanistan. This required visits to two ministerial departments in Balkh province: the Department of Justice and the Department of Foreign Affairs to verify the translation. That was before one of the bureaucrats noticed a tiny error on his nikahkhat over the amount of mahr he had paid to his wife:

I took my nikahkhat and its translated version to the Department of Justice for their confirmation. They saw that in the upper section, the amount of the mahr was written as 100,000 afghanis [around USD1,400], while in the lower section it was written as 90,000 afghanis. They objected to this and didn’t approve it. No matter how much I tried to explain that it was a mistake and that it should’ve said that the mahr was 100,000 afghanis, with 10,000 paid in cash and 90,000 remaining, they wouldn’t accept it. 

The judiciary gave Mansur a letter which he had to take to its district office in Sholgara, where he was last officially registered before he moved to Europe, so that they could correct the error and approve it.

But even after that, the process was still not over. As he needed an official nikahkhat in Europe, Mansur also had to take the translated version of the nikahkhat to the provincial Directorate of Foreign Affairs, to be signed and confirmed. Here, he faced another problem over a discrepancy between the address on his nikahkhat and the address on his ID:

The Directorate of Foreign Affairs was confused that my ID states my primary residence as Baghlan, and they asked why [ie, why it wasn’t Balkh]. I told them my ID had been issued several years ago in Baghlan, when I was still living there. Two years earlier, I’d moved to Sholgara, which was confirmed by the wakil-e guzar and the judge. But they didn’t accept this and said they’d give me another letter to take to Sholgara district so they could confirm I was living there.

Mansur said that getting a marriage certificate in Mazar-e Sharif meant not only bureaucracy but also corruption:

Everyone has problems with getting marriage certificates. They don’t issue them to anyone unless there’s an urgent need, such as being very ill, or if there’s an extraordinary matter brought by a [government] authority requiring them to issue it. For example, if someone has a serious illness that necessitates travel, they may issue a marriage certificate. In the city of Mazar, this is how it works. However, in the districts, if you pay a bribe, they’ll provide a guarantee and issue a marriage certificate. There, a local representative must confirm it, and you need to know someone who can confirm your residence, in exchange for money. 

Luckily for Mansur, his lawyer in Europe offered him advice:

I was very frustrated and disappointed. I’d have to go through the whole process again, which would be time-consuming. So, I didn’t do it. Instead, I contacted my lawyer in Europe and told him about the problems I was having. My lawyer said what I’d obtained was good enough and I shouldn’t worry about it, as they’d accept it without the approval of the Directorate of Foreign Affairs.

The defence lawyer in Balkh province, Amir Rasuli, was very critical of the amount of paperwork involved in getting a marriage certificate. Most steps, he said, were unnecessary and could be eliminated:

The whole process of obtaining a nikahkhat takes a lot of time. There are steps such as confirmation by two neighbours, going to the imam [mullah] of the mosque and the wakil-e guzar to confirm that a husband and wife live in a specific area of a province and then going to the municipality [office in the] district to confirm that the wakil-e guzar is still active – all of this is unnecessary. I believe that, when you have an ID card showing you are Afghan and a resident of Afghanistan, the relevant courts and other administrations should cut all the other paperwork and easily issue a nikahkhat for you.

It should be very simple. It should be that you apply, have your witnesses and your documents. Then the court should issue a nikahkhat for you based on your documents and the testimony of witnesses. This way, it won’t be time-consuming, and applicants won’t be tearing their hair out with frustration. 

It is not just the number of steps needed to get a document but also that it is not clear at the outset what is actually needed to obtain it. One of the threads running through our interviews is how information is given out ‘drip-by-drip’: interviewees think they have completed all the steps necessary, only to be told there is yet another step, which may require going back home to get other documents or getting signatures from relatives – who may not even be in the country. As well, people describe being told to go to one office, only to find that they had been sent to the wrong office and must go to another office instead, which may not even be in the same city or province and will certainly require more queuing and navigating the crowds. The lack of transparency and clear information about what steps are needed at the outset, is maddening. Interviewees end up exhausted, out of pocket and at their wits’ end.

Getting a passport or tazkira

Tazkiras and passports are even more essential than marriage certificates and just as difficult to obtain. They are necessary to work abroad, receive disability benefits, even getting a SIM card for your phone. Many Afghans have never had either a passport or an ID. According to a 2023 report by the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR, 86 per cent of the more than 70,000 households assessed reported a lack of such documents among their family members, especially women and girls. The following stories show how painful it can be to try to acquire these crucial documents, particularly when mistakes made by officials need fixing.

Having failed to find a job in Afghanistan, Leyaqat Ali, an unemployed university graduate from Ghazni province, decided to travel abroad for work. For this, he needed a passport and a visa:

I needed to support my family, along with my brothers, as my father passed away during the Covid-19 pandemic. I just couldn’t find a job, so I decided to go to either Pakistan or Iran for work. I needed a passport and a visa though. I applied for a passport online at the beginning of 2024. Then, in August 2024, I got a message that I should go to Kabul for all the procedures, such as giving my biometrics and payment.

Leyaqat went to Kabul, where he stayed with a relative, and left at six in the morning for the passport office. When he arrived, it was already crowded:

I wanted to go in, but a guard stopped me. I told him I had come from a remote area, but he got angry and shouted at me. He said they couldn’t take on any more clients that day. He told me to come back the next day, but very early.

Leyaqat had no option but to go back to his relative’s home and try again the next day:

The following day, I left at four in the morning and went to the passport office. I was surprised to see many people had come much earlier than me. I stood in a line where there were already 15 to 20 people ahead of me. 

This time, his papers were collected and he was told to go to either Pashtani Bank or the Afghanistan National Bank to pay the fee, which he did. Next, he had to get his biometrics taken. At this point, however, an error with his name was discovered:

An officer asked for my tazkira. When he checked my name, it didn’t match what was in the database. In my tazkira, my name is Sayed Leyaqat Ali, but in the database, it didn’t have the word ‘Sayed’. So my biometrics weren’t taken and the officer told me, “Go and correct your name and then come for the biometrics.” He told me that, at the entrance gate of the passport office, there was an office that deals with such issues. 

Leyaqat did as he was instructed, but after waiting in another crowd, he was turned away:

The employee checked my tazkira and told me, “Your name can’t be corrected here. You have to go to the General Directorate of Civil Registration Services at the National Statistics and Information Authority [NSIA] in Sara-ye Shamali.” I was very upset and hopeless, but I had to go. However, unfortunately, in Sara-ye Shamali, I was again told that it was impossible to correct my name there and that I had to go to my home province, Ghazni, to correct my name in my tazkira.

So Leyaqat went back to Ghazni, where he found yet another convoluted process:

I travelled to Ghazni and visited the statistics department. They kept sending me from one office to another and there was a lot of paperwork involved. It took me two days to complete the necessary forms. After that, I had to wait for a whole month to be notified that my name’d been corrected. Next, I needed to apply for an electronic ID, which took two months to get printed in Kabul and sent to Ghazni.

In total, he said, correcting his name on the tazkira and obtaining the electronic tazkira took three months. “Now that my tazkira is correct,” Leyaqat said, “and I have the electronic version, I need to go back to the passport office in Kabul for them to take my biometrics before I can obtain my passport.”

Having to correct a name in a tazkira is a common problem, which people complain is both time-consuming and costly to amend. Applicants accuse Taliban-appointed officials of sloppiness, of making mistakes in writing their names (in this Zawia News article, for example, officials wrote ‘Saqi’ instead of ‘Safi’). Sometimes, they even get the gender wrong. However, it is a problem familiar from the Republic and, indeed, earlier eras. There are also even bigger errors: it took Sayed Ali from Charolak district of Balkh almost a year to resolve the mistake that was preventing him getting an electronic ID.

Sayed Ali’s story: disabled, and made to wait for treatment for a year

Sayed Ali has a disability in one leg, which he wanted to get treated. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) informed him that he needed an electronic ID card to get treatment at their clinic. However, when he applied for it, he encountered inefficiency, delays, technical problems and blunders, all made worse by the fact of his disability: “First, I needed to correct an error in my tazkira,” he said, “because they’d swapped my father and grandfather’s names around. I had to pay money as a bribe to get that done so that I wouldn’t have to travel all the way to Kabul to correct it.” Then, once he’d registered, Sayed Ali had to wait for his tazkira to be issued at the National Statistics and Information Authority (NSIA) in Kabul and sent to Mazar-e Sharif:

I waited for four months. I was waiting for a message from the statistics department [in Mazar], but nothing happened. I had to go there, in person, as I really needed the tazkira for my treatment. They told me, “Your tazkira hasn’t been published in Kabul, so come again in a month’s time.”

Because of his disability, Sayed Ali asked his nephew to go to NSIA on his behalf:

[My nephew] went there, not once, not twice, but three times, each time after a month. Then, they said my electronic tazkira had come… But when they entered the serial number and searched their database, they said the tazkira wasn’t there. Over the next seven months, my nephew went back [to NISA] seven times and my tazkira still hadn’t come from Kabul. Then, I went with him and I told the people in NSIA that: “You see, I am disabled and I need to be treated for the injuries in my leg.” 

But, he said, they sent him away again:

After ten days, I visited that centre again with my nephew. His friend [at NISA] said that the tazkira had arrived. He showed us a tazkira and said, “Look! It is your tazkira. Your father’s name is Sayed Hussain.” However, it wasn’t mine. The photo in the tazkira looked like me and it had the same father’s name as mine, but it was not my tazkira. 

On the twelfth or thirteenth visit, the bureaucrats decided to start from scratch:

It was finally decided that we should pay 1,500 afghanis for a duplicate [al-musanna]. We paid again, and I was told the duplicate would be ready in three months. I went back four or five times to get the duplicate, and finally, it arrived.

By the time Sayed Ali’s duplicate tazkira came from Kabul, the mystery of the original missing tazkira was finally resolved:

NSIA employees had mistakenly given my tazkira to someone else, who had poor eyesight and couldn’t see that it wasn’t his tazkira. He took it home, but when he went to withdraw the money that his son in Europe had sent, the bank told him that the tazkira he’d brought as proof of his identity wasn’t his. 

Sayed Ali eventually got his ID card and was able to get medical treatment, but only after the best part of a year of stress and wasted time.

For Afghans in rural areas, getting documents means travelling and incurring additional expenses. The cost, both in lost work and money spent, may be something they can ill afford, but they deem it necessary because of all the services that now require documentation.

Farid Agha’s story: countless days, nights and afghanis wasted

“You can end up waiting for hours, or even days and nights, yet still can’t get an ID because there are too many crowds and too little organisation,” said Farid Agha, from Zurmat district of Paktia province. He needed an electronic ID because the government had made everything dependent on it. “Without it,” he said, “your SIM card would be blocked and you wouldn’t be able to get anything done in government offices.” What was even worse, Farid Agha needed documentation for his whole family. Since his daughter was going abroad, he needed to get a passport for her. Additionally, his son had passed the university entrance exam and needed to enrol, where an electronic ID was also required. There were no electronic ID services in his home district, so he had to travel to the provincial capital:

We made the trip to Gardez city to obtain the electronic ID. We registered at one of the photography shops there. I took my entire family with me – it’s more than two hours away – because I’d heard that all family members needed to be present for the ID process to proceed and the registration to be completed.

Farid Agha and his family had to wait in Gardez, where they knew no one, and the expenses built up:

I took the forms to the civil registration office. When we arrived, the office was extremely crowded and disorganised, making the wait for our forms to be checked very frustrating. We stood in line for two consecutive days, but our turn never came. Eventually, I had to send my family members back to the village because we didn’t have anyone to stay with in Gardez. We’d spent two nights in a hotel, but I could no longer afford to stay there. Travelling back and forth every day wasn’t feasible either, as the fare from our area to the centre is 500 afghanis per person [USD 7].

Farid Agha also had to return to his village and come back again to the civil registration office, but this time, he did not take his family with him. “They checked my paper documents, but only me and my two sons, who are at school, had the documents. The others [another son, two daughters and his wife] didn’t have any,” he said:

The officer told me that I needed to obtain confirmation from the head of the village and the relevant district office to verify that these are indeed my children. I also needed to bring my wife’s father’s ID to get a document for her as well. My wife’s family lives in Pakistan. 

He said the situation was very frustrating because, having waited for two weeks, he still could not obtain the ID. It was, he said, “a big headache.”

Farid Agha eventually managed to secure all the documentation, which took over a month, as they had to wait for some of the documents to come from Pakistan. When it was all in order, his family paid for the electronic IDs and had their biometrics taken. But there was one more problem:

I received my ID without any issue. However, there was a mistake in my son’s ID: his grandfather’s name was incorrectly written. The names of all my other children were correct, but my eldest son’s grandfather’s name was wrong. I hadn’t noticed it at the time, but when we got home, my son pointed it out, saying, “Dad, my ID has an error.” 

Farid Agha went back to Gardez to get the error in his son’s tazkira corrected, but officials told him he had to go to Kabul to fix it. He said that he had explained to them that it was their mistake, not his or his family’s, and questioned why he should have to go to Kabul. In response, they said that they did not have the authority to correct the name in the province:

I had no choice but to go to Kabul because all my son’s documents were at risk of becoming invalid. The information on his paper tazkira was different from what was on the electronic tazkira, which meant that all his educational documents could become invalid due to a single incorrect name. 

Farid Agha spent a lot of time in Kabul trying to correct his son’s name. It took a week of waiting at the civil registration office in Sara-ye Shamali before he got to speak to someone:

When it was my turn, the electronic tazkira department referred me to the Ministry of Interior. Upon arrival, I found it chaotic and overcrowded, making it impossible to secure a turn there. Only the general director of civil registration has the authority to issue orders. I ended up waiting for two days.

Finally, he was told he would need to bring his father’s or brother’s ID to correct the mistake. So he had to travel back to Paktia to retrieve both his father’s and brother’s tazkiras. After returning to the tazkira office, they had taken the documents and told him to come back in two days. When he went to collect his son’s tazkira, the manager at the electronic tazkera department surprised him with another problem:

He challenged me on the reported age of my son, claiming that he appeared older than what I’d indicated in the ID. This added to my frustration. I explained that I’d been trying to obtain the ID for three months and that the only issue was the name, which was an error made by one of his employees. I insisted that I know my son’s age since I am his father. Unfortunately, he refused to accept my explanation and ended up kicking me out of his office, instructing me to correct the age.

Through the help of a family friend, he eventually persuaded the manager to make the correction. But overall, obtaining electronic ID cards for his family cost Farid Agha a lot of money and trouble. He also complained that the price of tazkiras had increased under the Emirate:

During my travels, I ended up spending over 50,000 afghanis [USD 700] on hotel stays and car rentals, both to and from my destination. … The cost is prohibitively high, particularly for ordinary people like farmers. The price for the electronic ID is 500 afghanis [USD 7], and if any corrections are needed, the cost increases to 1,200 afghanis [USD 17].

During the Republic, an electronic ID card only cost 100 afghanis [USD 1.40], and corrections cost 500 afghanis. Now, however, the prices have changed drastically, making it a significant financial burden, especially in a country struggling with poverty.

Despite these challenges and the difficult circumstances of everyday life, hundreds of people still attempt to secure an electronic ID card. Unfortunately, when faced with these obstacles, many ultimately abandon their efforts.

These problems can be even worse for those forced to return to Afghanistan from Pakistan and Iran, especially those who have spent most or all of their lives outside the country. One aid worker told Human Rights Watch in a March 2025 report on deportations from Pakistan that the Emirate should open mobile tazkira-issuing centres at the border. If returning Afghans cannot obtain tazkiras, they cannot register their children for school or buy mobile phones or SIM cards.

Conclusion 

When Afghan citizens try to get electronic IDs, passports or marriage certificates, they face inefficiency, endless paperwork, exhausting waits in queues and in crowds and, for many, the need to travel. The convoluted bureaucracyadds to the expense of getting documentation, not only the money spent on fees, but also travel and hotel bills, and the opportunity cost of days wasted in government offices, when they could be working.

These are not new problems, but comparing the situation with the Republic, our interviews suggest there is now greater demand for documents, but not enough staff to deal with that demand. Indeed, there is some evidence that matters may have become even worse since the 20 per cent cut in public sector jobs (Amu), that were announced (Tolonews) in April 2025. In general, since before the fall of the Republic, access to documentation services has become better for men living in previously conflict-ridden areas, but worse for women because public offices are now so much more male-dominated spaces.

As to costs, prices for the documents themselves have gone up under the Emirate. Demands for bribes appear to be less prevalent than under the Republic, although several of our interviews mentioned that a bribe had ‘oiled the wheel’ of getting through one of the many steps in obtaining a document. The potential for unscrupulous officials to make money is clear and indeed, the many steps and different signatures needed create multiple ‘rent-seeking’ opportunities. An environment that is open to corruption is also encouraged by the lack of transparency, the fact that information about procedures is hard to obtain and there is uncertainty over regulations. As our interviewees’ stories show, mistakes by officials only compound the chaos and difficulty, with the burden of fixing administrative errors falling on citizens.

Given that the state not only demands various documents to access certain services but also makes money from issuing them, it could at least ensure that it keeps bureaucratic and procedural hurdles to a minimum. Yet the government shows little sign of recognising this problem, let alone addressing it, despite the acute hardships that most Afghans are facing.

Edited by Kate Clark and Rachel Reid