Kandahar is a major city in southern Afghanistan, serving as the capital of Kandahar Province. It is within the jurisdiction of Kandahar District and has an estimated population of 732,629 settled residents. Mullah Hekmatullah is the current mayor of the city. His predecessor was Haji Nimatullah Hassan.
Kandahar is located between the Arghandab River and the Tarnak River, at an elevation of approximately 1,010 m (3,310 ft) above sea level. It is the center of the larger cultural region called Loy Kandahar. The Kandahar Municipality is administratively divided into 15 city districts (nahias), covering a land area of 273 km2 (105 sq mi). It has a number of industrial parks, public parks, bazaars, business centers, banks, hotels, restaurants, mosques, hospitals, universities, tourist sites, and places to play sports or just relax. The Ayno Maina township is located in the northeastern part of the city, next to the Kabul–Kandahar Highway.
The region around Kandahar is one of the oldest known areas of human settlement. A major fortified city existed at the site of Kandahar, probably as early as c. 1000–750 BC, and it became an important outpost of the Achaemenid Empire in the 6th century BC. Alexander the Great laid the foundation of what is now Old Kandahar (in the southwestern area of the current city) in the 4th century BC and named it Alexandria Arachosia. Many empires have long fought over the city due to its strategic location along the trade routes of southern, central and western Asia. In 1709, Mirwais Hotak turned the region into an independent kingdom and made Kandahar the capital of the Hotak dynasty. In 1747, Ahmad Shah Durrani, founder of the Durrani dynasty, made Kandahar the capital of the Durrani Empire. It was briefly occupied by the British in the 19th century, the Soviets in the 1980s, and recently by NATO forces.
Kandahar is the founding city and spiritual center of the Taliban. Despite the nation's capital being Kabul, where all government ministries and institutions are based, Kandahar is the seat of power in Afghanistan as the supreme leader and his spiritual advisers are based there. Kandahar has therefore been called the de facto capital of Afghanistan, though the Taliban maintain Kabul as the official capital.
Kandahar is one of the most culturally significant cities of the Pashtun community and has been their traditional seat of power for more than 300 years. It is a major industrial and trading center. The region produces some of the finest fruits, especially figs, grapes, pomegranates and mulberries, and the city has plants for canning, drying, and packing fruits.
Name
The origin of the name Kandahar remains a subject of scholarly debate. According to the scholar Warwick Ball, the name of Kandahar is probably derived from that of Gandhara, with C. E. Bosworth stating in the Encyclopedia of Islam that the "name Ḳandahār itself must be connected with Gandhāra". The early Arab writers usually mentioned Gandhara proper as Kandahar or Qandahar due to the absence of the letter 'G' in Arabic. The 10th-century geographer al-Ma'sudi states the name to have been carried from Gandhara proper to what would later be known as modern Kandahar by "the settlement of the Gandharians on the banks of the Arghastan". C. E. Bosworth and John Everett-Heath also suggest that Kandahar gained its name from the settlement of Gandharans in the region.
According to another theory of its name, it is derived from that of the city built here, Alexandria Arachosia by Alexander the Great in 330 BC. The name "Alexander" in the local Pashto language is rendered as "Iskandar". It is believed that over time this transformed into "Scandar", and eventually the modern "Kandahar". The change of the name from "Scandar" to Candar is mentioned by the 16th-century Portuguese historian João de Barros in his work, Décadas da Ásia. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names considers suggestion of its derivation from Alexander or Iskandar less plausible, with S. W. Helmes and Warwick Ball rejecting it in favour of derivation from Gandhara.
Ernst Herzfeld claimed Kandahar perpetuated the name of the Indo-Parthian king Gondophares, who re-founded the city under the name Gundopharron. However, modern historians and linguists generally find this derivation implausible. According to Abdur Rahman, the name is usually translated as "the land of fragrance" (from Sanskrit gandha 'fragrance' and -hara 'land').
History
Prehistory
Excavations of prehistoric sites by archaeologists such as Louis Dupree and others suggest that the region around Kandahar is one of the oldest known human settlements known so far.
Early peasant farming villages came into existence in Afghanistan ca. 5000 B.C., or 7000 years ago. Deh Morasi Ghundai, the first prehistoric site to be excavated in Afghanistan, lies 27 km (17 mi) southwest of Kandahar (Dupree, 1951). Another Bronze Age village mound site with multiroomed mud-brick buildings dating from the same period sits nearby at Said Qala (J. Shaffer, 1970). Second millennium B.C. Bronze Age pottery, copper and bronze horse trappings and stone seals were found in the lowermost levels in the nearby cave called Shamshir Ghar (Dupree, 1950). In the Seistan, southwest of these Kandahar sites, two teams of American archaeologists discovered sites relating to the 2nd millennium B.C. (G. Dales, University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, 1969, 1971; W, Trousdale, Smithsonian Institution, 1971 – 76). Stylistically the finds from Deh Morasi and Said Qala tie in with those of pre-Indus Valley sites and with those of comparable age on the Iranian Plateau and in Central Asia, indicating cultural contacts during this very early age.
British excavations in the 1970s discovered that Kandahar existed as a large fortified city during the early 1st millennium BC; while this earliest period at Kandahar has not been precisely dated via radiocarbon, ceramic comparisons with the latest period at the major Bronze Age city of Mundigak have suggested an approximate time-frame of 1000 to 750 BC. This fortified city became an important outpost of the Achaemenid Empire in the 6th to 4th centuries BC, and formed part of the province of Arachosia.
Ancient history
The main inhabitants of Arachosia were the Pakhtas, an ancient Indo-Aryan tribe, who might have been among the ancestors of modern Pashtuns. Mundigak served as the provincial capital of Arachosia and was ruled by the Medes followed by the Achaemenids until the arrival of the Macedonians. The now-called Old Kandahar was founded in 330 BC by Alexander the Great, near the site of the ancient city of Mundigak (established around 3000 BC era), as Alexandria Arachosia.
Kandahar was a frequent target for conquest because of its strategic location in Asia, controlling the main trade route linking South Asia with West Asia and Central Asia. The territory became part of the Seleucid Empire after the death of Alexander.
It is mentioned by Strabo that a treaty of friendship was established eventually between the Greeks and the Mauryas (Indians). While the Diadochi were warring amongst themselves, the Mauryas were expanding in the northern part of Indian subcontinent. The founder of the empire, Chandragupta Maurya, confronted a Macedonian invasion force led by Seleucus I in 305 BC and following a brief conflict, an agreement was reached as Seleucus ceded Gandhara, Arachosia and areas south of Bagram to the Mauryas.
During the Mauryan period, Buddhism was introduced and eventually become one of the major religions alongside Zoroastrianism. Inscriptions made by Emperor Ashoka, a fragment of Edict 13 in Greek, as well as a full Edict, written in both Greek and Aramaic has been discovered in Kandahar. Written in Classical Greek, in this Edict Ashoka used the word Eusebeia ("Piety") as the Greek translation for the ubiquitous "Dharma" of his other Edicts written in Prakrit.
The city eventually became part of the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom (250 BC – 125 BC), and continued that way for two hundred years under the later Indo-Greek Kingdom (180 BC – 10 AD). Hellenistic polities were followed successively by Indo-Scythians, Indo-Parthians, and Kushan; who were in turn followed by a variety of Hunnic kingdoms, notably Nezak Huns, and in the 7th century, by Zunbils.
Medieval history
Muslim conquest
In the 7th century AD, Arab caliphates initiated the conquest of the region. The leader of the expedition was Abbad ibn Ziyad, who governed Sijistan between 673 and 681. In 870, Yaqub ibn Layth Saffari, a local ruler of the Saffarid dynasty, made Islam the official religion of the area after defeating the Zunbil dynasty, while others claim it was an Eastern Persian realm where the inhabitants practiced Zurvanism.
Ghaznavids
The region fell to the Ghaznavids under Sebüktegin and his son Mahmud of Ghazni in the 10th/11th centuries, followed by Muhammad of Ghor. Kandahar appears to have been renamed Teginābād in the 10th–12th centuries, but the origin of the new name is unclear. During this period, nearby Panjwayi served as the administrative center for the area. However, Kandahar was of much more strategic importance, to the extent that Minhaj-i-Siraj attributes the downfall of the Ghaznavids to the loss of Kandahar. The city's name was changed back to Kandahar by the 13th century, after Ala ad-Din Husayn Jahansuz sacked Lashkari Bazar, near Bost. Again, the reason for the name change is not clear.
Mongols
Kandahar was besieged by a Mongol army in 1221, although Jalal al-Din Mangburni defeated them. In 1251, upon accession to the Mongol throne, Möngke Khan granted Kandahar, along with other lands in Afghanistan, to Shams ad-Din Mohammad Kart of the Kart dynasty. However, the city is mentioned as being under Chagatai control in 1260–61; Kandahar did not come under Kart control until 1281. Later, in 1318, a Chagatai prince raised an army from Kandahar against the Ilkhanid governor of Sistan. Kandahar was described by Ibn Battuta in 1333 as a large and prosperous town three nights journey from Ghazni.
Timur, founder of the Timurid Empire, captured Kandahar in 1383 and later made his grandson Pir Muhammad the governor of the region. Following his death in 1405, the region was ruled by other Timurid governors. Kandahar was entrusted to the Arghuns in the late 15th century, who eventually achieved independence from the Timurids. Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, is believed to have visited the town (c. 1521 AD) during his journey between Hindustan and Mecca in Arabia.
Mughals and Safavids
Timur's descendant, Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire, annexed Kandahar in 1508. In 1554, Babur's son, Humayun, handed it over to the Safavid Shah Tahmasp in return of 12,000 soldiers he received from the Shah to reconquer India. In 1595, Humayun's son Akbar the Great took back the city by diplomacy. When news about Akbar's death reached the Persian court, Shah Abbas ordered his army to besiege the city which finally failed due to the reinforcements sent by the Mughal Emperor Jahangir that forced the Safavid retreat. In the siege of 1648–49, Mughal Kandahar, which was being defended by Daulat Khan Mayi, was once again lost when it was captured by the Safavids under Abbas II. Following efforts by Mughals to reclaim it proved unsuccessful. The city was important to Delhi because it was one of the gateways to Hindustan, and Mughal control over Kandahar helped to prevent foreign intrusions. The memory of the wars fought over Kandahar at this time is preserved in the epic poem Qandahār-nāma ("The Campaign Against Qandahār"), a major work of Saib Tabrizi which is a classic of Persian literature.
Mirwais Hotak, chief of the Ghilji tribe, revolted in 1709 by killing Gurgin Khan, an ethnic Georgian subject and governor of the Shia Safavid Persians. After establishing the Hotak dynasty in Kandahar, Mirwais and his Afghan army successfully defeated subsequent expeditions by Kay Khusraw and Rustam Khan. It has been said that Mirwais resisted attempts by the Persian government who was seeking to convert the people of Kandahar from Sunni to the Shia sect of Islam. He died of a natural death in November 1715 and was succeeded by his brother Abdul Aziz, but after being suspected of giving Kandahar's sovereignty back to the Persians he was killed by his nephew Mahmud Hotak.
In 1722, Mahmud led an army of Afghans to the Safavid capital Isfahan and proclaimed himself King of Persia. The Hotak dynasty was eventually removed from power by a new Persian ruler, Nader Shah. In 1738, Nader Shah invaded Afghanistan and destroyed the now Old Kandahar, which was held by Hussain Hotak and his Ghilji tribes. In the same year, Nader Shah freed Ahmad Khan (later Ahmad Shah Durrani) and his brother Zulfikar who were held as political prisoners by the Hotak ruler. Before leaving southern Afghanistan for Delhi in Hindustan, Nader Shah laid out the foundation for a new town to be built next to the destroyed ancient city, naming it "Naderabad". His rule ended in June 1747 after being murdered by his Persian guards.
Ahmad Shah Durrani, chief of the Durrani tribe, gained control of Kandahar and made it the capital of his new Afghan Empire in October 1747. Initially, Ahmad Shah had trouble finding land on which to build his city. His own tribe had no extensive lands and others who had, such as the Alikozai and Barakzai, refused to give up their lands. Only the Popalzai finally offered him his pick of their lands. The foundations for the city were laid in June 1761. Once begun, the city was built with grand proportions. It was laid out in the form of a regular rectangle with a circumference of three miles; walls 30 feet thick at the bottom and 15 feet at the top, rose 27 feet high to enclose it. Outside, the walls were ringed by a moat 24 feet wide. Six mammoth gateways pierced these walls: the Eid Gah Gate on the north, the Shikarpur Gate on the south; the Herat and Top Khana Gates on the west; and, the Bar Durrani and Kabul Gates on the east. At its peak, Ahmad Shah's empire included present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Khorasan and Kohistan provinces of Iran, along with Punjab in India. In October 1772, Ahmad Shah retired and died from a natural cause. A new city was laid out by Ahmad Shah and is dominated by his mausoleum, which is adjacent to the Mosque of the Cloak in the centre of the city. By 1776, his eldest son Timur Shah had transferred Afghanistan's main capital, due to several conflicts with various Pashtun tribes, from Kandahar to Kabul, where the Durrani legacy continued.