Who ruled Kabul?

Kabul lies in a high valley about 1,800 metres above sea level, hemmed in by bare mountains where the Kabul River cuts east towards the Khyber Pass and the plains of India. That position has defined it for more than two thousand years. Whoever held the valley controlled one of the main roads between Central Asia, Iran and the Indian subcontinent, so Kabul has repeatedly been a frontier fortress, a royal retreat and a prize fought over by much larger empires.

Nobody knows exactly when the city began. The Rigveda and the Avesta both name the river, and Greek writers called the area Kophen. In the 500s BCE the valley was a province of the Achaemenid Empire, and after Alexander's conquest it passed to the Seleucids, who ceded it to the Mauryas of India in 305 BCE. Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kings, then Indo-Scythians, followed. In the 1st century CE the Kushan Empire absorbed the valley, and for several centuries Kabul and nearby Kapisa formed part of a thriving Buddhist world of monasteries and stupas. After the Kushans came Sasanian vassals, Hunnic peoples such as the Kidarites and Hephthalites, and finally local dynasties known as the Kabul Shahis, Turkic at first and later Hindu.

Arab armies raided the valley from the 7th century, but Islam advanced slowly. The Saffarid ruler Yaqub ibn al-Layth took Kabul in 870, and Sabuktigin of Ghazni secured it for good around 977. Under the Ghaznavids and their successors the population became mostly Muslim. The Mongols ravaged the region in the 1220s, and when Ibn Battuta passed through in 1333 he found Kabul shrunk to a village.

Kabul revived under the Timurids. In 1504 Babur, a Timurid prince driven out of Central Asia, seized it and made it his base for two decades. From here he launched the invasion of India that founded the Mughal Empire in 1526. He loved the valley and asked to be buried there; his garden tomb still stands on a slope above the city. For about two centuries Kabul was a Mughal provincial capital and frontier post, until the Iranian ruler Nader Shah captured it in 1738.

After Nader's death in 1747, Ahmad Shah Durrani founded an Afghan kingdom, and in 1776 his son Timur Shah moved the capital from Kandahar to Kabul, where it has stayed. In the 19th century the city became a pawn in the rivalry between Britain and Russia. During the First Anglo-Afghan War a British-backed king was installed in 1839, but an uprising in 1841 forced the British garrison into a winter retreat in January 1842 in which most of the army and its camp followers were killed or captured. British troops returned that year and again in 1879, during the Second Anglo-Afghan War.

In 1919 Amanullah Khan proclaimed full independence and began building a new quarter at Darulaman. Through the middle of the century Kabul grew into a modernising capital with a university, foreign-built factories and, in the 1960s and 1970s, a stream of Western travellers. The communist coup of 1978 and the Soviet intervention of December 1979 began decades of war. The city suffered its worst damage in the factional fighting of 1992 to 1996, after which the Taliban took control. A US-led coalition drove them out in 2001, and Kabul grew rapidly as the capital of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan until the Taliban returned on 15 August 2021.

Today Kabul is by far the largest city in the country, with an estimated five million people or more, and the seat of the Taliban government.