Afghan farmer beheaded with a PENKNIFE after refusing to let drug lords take his daughter and sell her as a sex slave

• Afghan opium farmers fall into debt to gangs when their crops are destroyed
• The smugglers take family members as collateral for unpaid debts
• Girls as young as 10 are sent abroad to become sex slaves and drug mules

Opium gangs in Afghanistan are using the sons and daughters of farmers as collateral for unpaid debts - with horrendous consequences for those who refuse.

A documentary has exposed the stomach-churning reality facing the war-torn nation's farmers, who borrow money from drug lords to set up cultivation of opium, used to make heroin, but are left destitute when NATO-backed Afghan forces destroy their crops.

The drug lords then take their children, including girls as young as 10, to places like Pakistan and Iran to sell them into the sex trade or use them as drug mules.

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Horrific: This little girl faces being handed over to an Afghan drug gang to secure the father's safe return. Her mother has no choice but to agree to the drug smugglers' demands

This girl escaped her captors. She said escape her captors. She said: 'They wouldn't allow me to change my clothes. They did every possible cruelty to me'

The makers of Opium Brides, a film made as part of American broadcaster PBS' investigative documentary series Frontline, obtained footage of one farmer being slowly beheaded with a penknife.

He had refused to hand over his daughter to the gang.

'It just seemed too awful to be true,' producer Jamie Doran, who made the film with Afghan investigative reporter Najibullah Quraishi, told CNN.

'There was one poor farmer who couldn't pay the traffickers back and refused to give his daughter away.

'And we actually have the entire film of him being beheaded with a penknife. That's what they do if you refuse to hand over your daughters.'

The film also features an interview with a little girl, aged around six, who faces being handed over to the drug runners in exchange for her father, who was captured after he could not pay up.

She said: 'The smugglers will take me by force and my mother can't stop them.'

Her father's captors sent a film of him blindfolded and in the dark. In it the father is seen to say: 'This is a really bad place. I beg you, give them whatever they want.

Shocking: Producer Jamie Doran, left, and Afghan reporter Najibullah Quraishi describe their harrowing film

The pair told CNN's Christiane Amanpour about their horrific encounters and of the tragic victims at the mercy of Afghan drug lords

'Give it to them.'

The mother, who can't even look at her daughter, is also interviewed.

'I have to give them my daughter to release my husband,' she states, flatly.

The filmmakers believe there are many hundreds, if not thousands of girls on the run from the traffickers.

And the problem will only get worse when NATO forces leave Afghanistan in 2014, Mr Quraishi said.

Mr Doran added: 'I don't know if there's a solution because the world demands poppy cultivation for its heroin addiction.

'So you know, maybe the blame shouldn't just be put onto the Afghan government. Maybe we should be looking inside ourselves a little more.'

Afghan anti-narcotics personnel destroy poppies in the district of Shindand. But their efforts to eliminate the trade put the farmers at the mercy of drug runners

An Afghan policeman stands guard as an eight ton pile of opium, heroin and hashish is incinerated in Kabul in 2004