Aigun and Sunar Ismailova’s world shattered along with their best friend’s Khatira on a crisp spring day in 2014 when she was kidnapped on her way home from school in their village of Kabali, in eastern Georgia. Khatira and Aigun, then both 16, were walking down the street when a car stopped near them, a stranger got off and forced Khatira into the vehicle. Three other men helped him. The girls screamed, but the street was empty, nobody could help them.

The man was later arrested and sentenced to one year behind bars. Yet, in a society where tradition rules, the shame was on the girl. Once released, in 2015, Khatira’s family forced her to marry her kidnapper. Aigun and Sunar have rarely seen their friend since then, and always by accident.

The Caucasus has long had a reputation of bride kidnapping whereby single young men abduct their bride of choice, thus pressuring them and their families to marriage. Outlawed during the Soviet Union, the practise started to soar once the USSR broke down, when unemployment, political and social instability gripped the country. Bride kidnapping has been criminalized since 2004 and forced marriages since 2015 and are punished with up to 400 hours of public labour or up to two years in jail. Most underage marriages however slip through the net as they are not registered and the couple marries only in the local church or mosque.

Khatira’s case, however shows that the practise is still alive and it has far-reaching consequences. Fearing for his daughters, a fate similar to Khatira’s, Nadira Ismail decided to take Sunar and Aigun out of school.