Who ruled Kandahar?

Kandahar stands between the Arghandab and Tarnak rivers in southern Afghanistan, on routes that have long linked India, Iran and Central Asia. A fortified town existed here early in the first millennium BCE, and the site was refounded by Alexander the Great. In 1747 it became the first capital of the Durrani Afghan state, and it remains the leading city of the Pashtuns and, since the 1990s, the spiritual centre of the Taliban.

The countryside around Kandahar holds some of the oldest farming villages yet excavated in Afghanistan, including Deh Morasi Ghundai, about 27 kilometres to the south-west, dated to around 5000 BCE. British excavations in the 1970s showed that a large walled city stood on the site in the early first millennium BCE, perhaps from about 1000 to 750 BCE, though this has not been fixed by radiocarbon dating. In the sixth to fourth centuries BCE it formed an important Achaemenid outpost in the province of Arachosia.

Alexander the Great founded Alexandria Arachosia, the core of what is now called Old Kandahar, in 330 BCE. After his death it passed to the Seleucids, but around 305 BCE Seleucus I ceded Arachosia to Chandragupta Maurya after a short war. Under the Maurya Empire Buddhism spread here, and edicts of the emperor Ashoka have been found at Kandahar, one in Greek and another in both Greek and Aramaic. Rule then passed in turn to the Greco-Bactrians, Indo-Greeks, Indo-Scythians, Indo-Parthians and Kushans, and later to Hunnic dynasties and the local Zunbil kings.

The origin of the name is debated. Several scholars connect it with Gandhara, possibly through settlers from that region, while an older theory derives it from Iskandar, the local form of Alexander; the Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names considers the Alexander derivation less plausible.

Arab armies began campaigning in the region in the seventh century, but the area was not firmly brought under Muslim rule until the Saffarid ruler Yaqub ibn Layth defeated the Zunbils in 870. Kandahar then fell to the Ghaznavids under Sebuktegin and Mahmud of Ghazni, and afterwards to the Ghurids; for a time in the tenth to twelfth centuries it seems to have been called Teginabad. A Mongol army besieged it in 1221 but was beaten off by the Khwarazmian prince Jalal al-Din. Later it was held by the Kart dynasty, the Chagatai Mongols and the Timurids, and Ibn Battuta, visiting in 1333, found it a large and prosperous town.

Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire, took Kandahar in 1508, and for the next century and a half it was a prize contested between the Mughals and the Safavid Empire of Persia, valued in Delhi as a gateway to India. Humayun handed it to Shah Tahmasp in 1554 in return for military help, Akbar recovered it by diplomacy in 1595, and the Safavid shah Abbas II captured it in the siege of 1648 to 1649. Repeated Mughal attempts to retake it failed.

In 1709 the Pashtun chief Mirwais Hotak broke the region away as an independent kingdom with Kandahar as the seat of his Hotak dynasty, whose ruler Mahmud went on to seize the Safavid capital, Isfahan, in 1722. In 1738 Nader Shah destroyed Old Kandahar and began a new town nearby. After Nader's murder in 1747, Ahmad Shah Durrani seized Kandahar and chose it as the capital of the Afghan empire he was founding, laying out a new walled city from 1761, where his mausoleum stands beside the Mosque of the Cloak. His son Timur Shah moved the capital to Kabul by 1776. From 1818 to 1855 Kandahar was an independent principality under the rule of Dost Mohammad Khan's half-brothers, and British forces held it from 1839 to 1842 during the First Anglo-Afghan War.

During the Soviet-Afghan War it saw heavy fighting and bombing, and its population fell from about 200,000 to no more than 25,000 by 1987. After 1992 rival commanders struggled for control, and in 1994 the Taliban under Mullah Omar made Kandahar their headquarters. In the war that began in 2001 the city fell to anti-Taliban forces and became a major base for American, Canadian and other NATO troops, while insurgent attacks and assassinations continued. The Taliban retook it around 12 August 2021. The city now has an estimated 730,000 settled residents, most of them Pashtuns.