Afghan Teen Uses Hip-Hop to Escape Arranged Marriage

Sonita Alizadeh has an amazing story that has brought her from war-torn Afghanistan to a small prep school in Utah and a burgeoning hip-hop career. A profile written by CNN details Alizadeh's escape from the Taliban-ruled city of Herat, Afghanistan, where she would have been destined for a pre-arranged marriage, to Iran, where the 18-year-old discovered her love for poetry and Eminem. While in Iran, Sonita eventually began writing her own songs but, as CNN notes, "singing solo as a female is illegal in Iran without special permission from the government--she managed to rap in secret with the help of a few defiant music producers."

Rapping about her abused friends, many of whom she saw being married at ages as young as 12 to much older men, Sonita first gained recognition in 2014 when she won $1,000 in a U.S.-funded competition to get voters in Afghanistan to the polls. After being told by her mother at the age of 16 that she must return to Afghanistan for to marry an older man, Sonita wrote and did a music video (above) for a song called "Daughters for Sale."

The song caught the attention of the Strongheart Group, an American organization that offered Sonita a student visa where she could attend Wasatch Academy in Utah on a full scholarship to receive a full education and chase her dreams as a rapper. The story states that the young woman hopes to return to Afghanistan as a rapper for woman's rights saying, "my country needs a person like me."