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Article snippet: KABUL, Afghanistan — On visiting days in the women’s wing of Pul-e-Charki prison in Kabul, Najia Nasim would regularly see a little girl named Dahlia waiting outside her mother’s cell, standing up straight, wearing a small backpack. Inside the backpack were all of the girl’s clothes and a few personal possessions. Ms. Nasim goes to the prison regularly to look for children who are older than 5, and thus eligible to be freed and put in one of her organization’s orphanages. These are children who are in prison only because their mothers are there, with no one else in their family willing or able to take them. Dahlia was hardly bigger than a toddler, but her mother claimed she was 5, which Ms. Nasim did not believe; 4 at most, she said. “Her mother would always say, ‘The last time when you didn’t take her, she cried all day.’ She begged me please take her,” Ms. Nasim said. Their orphanages were not equipped for children younger than 5, but Dahlia was advanced for her apparent age, toilet trained and able to dress herself, and Ms. Nasim finally gave in. “I couldn’t help it,” she said. Now the girl is among 108 children at the Children’s Support Center in Kabul, an orphanage run by Women for Afghan Women and financed by the United States government as a refuge for the children of imprisoned mothers. Ms. Nasim is the group’s country director. Most of the women in Afghan jails are there for so-called morals crimes, like abandoning abusive husbands or having been charged... Link to the full article to read more