Afghanistan

Crossroads of empires, from Bactria and the Bamiyan Buddhas to the Durrani state and the wars of the modern age.

Ringed by the Hindu Kush at the meeting point of Persia, Central Asia and India, Afghanistan has for millennia been a crossroads of armies, faiths and trade. Its soil bore the Greco-Bactrian kingdoms, the Buddhist civilisation that carved the colossal Bamiyan Buddhas, the Islamic conquest and the brilliant Ghaznavid, Ghurid and Timurid courts. The modern state was founded in 1747 when Ahmad Shah Durrani was elected ruler at Kandahar, after which the country became the buffer and battlefield of the nineteenth-century 'Great Game' between Britain and Russia, winning full control of its foreign affairs in 1919. Monarchy gave way in 1973 to a republic, then to a communist coup, the Soviet war, civil war and the Taliban, whose movement fell to a US-led intervention in 2001 and returned to power in August 2021.