Kandahar

Kandahar is Afghanistan's second-largest city and the capital of Kandahar Province, set on the plain of the Arghandab River in the country's south.^[5]^[1]^[2] Its position astride the routes linking the Indian subcontinent with Central Asia, Iran, and the Persian Gulf has made it one of the most fought-over cities in Asian history.^[3]

Ancient foundations

The city grew up in the ancient region of Arachosia. A fortified settlement existed on or near the site by the early first millennium BCE — the earliest possible date of occupation is around 1000 BCE, with pottery evidence favouring about 700 BCE — and under the Achaemenid Persian empire it expanded into a walled, quartered city with its own citadel, quite possibly the regional capital the Persians knew as Harauvatiš. The ruins of this ancient city, known as Old Kandahar, lie approximately four kilometres west of the modern city.^[4]

Tradition makes Alexander the Great the city's founder, renaming it "Alexandria in Arachosia" around 330 BCE, and the modern name is usually traced to that Greek origin.^[3]^[4] Yet the earliest chroniclers of Alexander record no such foundation: the name Alexandropolis appears only in late classical writers such as Isidore of Charax (first century CE), and scholars treat the identification with Kandahar as probable but unproven.^[4]^[5]

Later ages left clearer marks. A bilingual Greek-and-Aramaic rock edict of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka (third century BCE) was discovered on the hillside of Chilzina, the carved outcrop above the old city, and coins of the Indo-Parthian king Gondophares have been recovered nearby.^[5]

From caliphs to caravans

After the Arab conquest of the seventh century, Kandahar belonged in turn to the Saffarid, Ghaznavid, Ghurid, Khwarazmian, Mongol, Kart, and Timurid states. From the early sixteenth century it became a prize contested between the Mughals of India and the Safavids of Persia, changing hands repeatedly over some two hundred years.^[3]

The Hotaks and Nader Shah

In 1709 Mirwais Hotak raised the region in revolt against Safavid Persia and made Kandahar the capital of an independent Afghan kingdom; his son Mahmud marched on Isfahan in 1722 and briefly claimed the Persian throne.^[3] The experiment collapsed when Nader Shah of Iran stormed and destroyed Old Kandahar — remembered locally as Zor Shar or Shahr-e Kona, the "Old City" — in 1738 after a siege of well over a year, and founded a short-lived replacement, Naderabad, beside the ruins.^[3]^[5]^[14]

Capital of the Durranis

After Nader Shah's assassination in June 1747, the young Ahmad Shah Durrani was chosen king near Kandahar and founded there the state that grew into modern Afghanistan, with Kandahar as its first capital.^[1]^[7] He soon laid out a grand new city north of Naderabad: Encyclopaedia Iranica reports construction was ordered in early 1756, while other accounts place the laying of the foundations in June 1761.^[3]^[7] Built on a trapezoidal plan ringed by walls pierced with six named gates, it divided into four quarters by two main streets crossing at right angles beneath a domed covered bazaar, the chaharsuq; its blocks were settled by tribe, and a royal palace occupied the northern centre.^[5]^[3] An irrigation canal dug from the Arghandab River served it, bearing the proud name ashraf al-belad, "noblest of cities", an epithet the minted coins applied to Kandahar itself.^[7]

The court moved on under Ahmad Shah's son Timur Shah, who transferred the capital to Kabul in the mid-1770s — sources give 1775 or 1776 — leaving Kandahar the unrivalled metropolis of the Pashtun south.^[3]^[7] Under the Barakzai dynasty that succeeded the Durrani Empire, Kandahar enjoyed periods of semi-independence: a line of Sardars ruled the Principality of Kandahar from the 1820s until Rahim Dil Khan, the last Sardar, was overthrown by Dost Muhammad Khan in 1856 and the city was absorbed directly into the emirate.^[13]

The Iron Amir's Kandahar

When Abdur Rahman Khan became Amir in 1880, Kandahar was still a major centre of Pashtun power and a source of persistent rebellion. His forces faced repeated uprisings from the Ghilzai and other Pashtun tribes in the region. In 1889, the Amir personally led a campaign against Kandahar, besieging the city and crushing the rebellion with severe reprisals. He dismantled the old power structures, executed or exiled rebel leaders, and reorganised the province under direct central control.^[6] The city's fortifications were reinforced, and a garrison was stationed to deter further insurrection.

Wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

British forces briefly occupied the city during the Anglo-Afghan wars of the nineteenth century, and it was outside its walls, on 1 September 1880, that Roberts' relief army fought the last battle of the Second Anglo-Afghan War — see Battle of Kandahar (1880).^[3] During the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, government troops were never really able to secure Kandahar and held chiefly its airport — a field laid out in the 1960s with American aid — while the city played a major part in the resistance against the communist government.^[5]

Taliban birthplace

In the autumn of 1994 the Taliban movement emerged around the former anti-Soviet commander Mullah Muhammad Omar, drawing recruits from religious schools in Kandahar and across the Pakistani border.^[8] It seized the border town of Spin Boldak in October 1994 and captured Kandahar itself, meeting little resistance, that November.^[9] Kandahar became the movement's headquarters and remained so until the US-led overthrow of 2001.^[1]

It was at Kandahar, in the spring of 1996, that Omar displayed the Cloak of the Prophet Muhammad from a rooftop before a vast crowd — a pivotal moment in his claim to the title Amir al-Mu'minin, "Commander of the Faithful".^[10] When the Taliban returned to power a generation later, Kandahar was among the last provincial capitals to fall, surrendering on 13 August 2021, the day before Kabul.^[11]

Fruit, trade, and shrines

Kandahar remains the agricultural heart of the south: its pomegranates, grapes, and figs lead the province's exports, grown in the irrigated orchards of Arghandab, Panjwayi, and neighbouring districts, and as recently as 2007 farming engaged roughly 45 percent of the provincial workforce.^[11] The city's industrial park, long the processing centre for the region's dried fruit, nearly collapsed after August 2021 for lack of electricity.^[11]

At the heart of the modern city stands the shrine of the Kherqa Sharif, housing the Cloak of the Prophet, facing the mausoleum of Ahmad Shah Durrani across a shared enclosure.^[10] The cloak itself was brought to Kandahar in 1768 — most accounts as a gift from Murad Beg, emir of Bukhara, though the relic's earlier home is debated — and it stays locked away, shown only rarely and guarded by the same family for more than two centuries.^[10]^[12] To the west, the grass-grown ramparts of Old Kandahar preserve the outline of the ancient town.^[14]