The Hazara Resistance at Guldara: A Battle That History Forgot
In the mountains of central Afghanistan, in the 1880s and 1890s, a series of armed uprisings unfolded that would reshape the Hazara people for generations. These were not scattered skirmishes. They were organized, sustained acts of resistance against an Amir who had declared their extermination a religious duty. The Hazara rose up at least three times. Each time, they were defeated. And each defeat was followed by a wave of killing, enslavement, and dispossession that fundamentally altered who they were as a people and where they stood within the Afghan state. Almost none of this appears in English-language history. This article attempts to recover it.
The Amir Who Would Unify Afghanistan by Force
Abdur Rahman Khan came to power as Emir of Afghanistan in 1880, in the immediate aftermath of the Second Anglo-Afghan War. The Treaty of Gandamak had ceded Afghanistan's foreign policy to the British but granted the new Amir internal autonomy. Abdur Rahman used that autonomy methodically. His stated goal was national consolidation - bringing the semi-autonomous regions of Turkistan, Hazarajat, and Kafiristan under the authority of Kabul. The method was force, frequently extreme.
Abdur Rahman is often described in Western sources as a modernizer and a strong state-builder - the "Iron Amir." His own two-volume memoir, The Life of Abdur Rahman, published in 1900 and edited by Sultan Mahomed Khan, presents a narrative of rational statecraft. What that account minimizes is the scale of violence deployed against communities resisting centralization and the specifically ethnic and sectarian character of the campaigns against the Hazara. Abdur Rahman's consolidation was not merely political; it was, in the Hazarajat, systematically targeting a particular group.
The Hazarajat - the high central plateau of Afghanistan, encompassing areas that now form parts of Bamyan, Daikundi, Uruzgan, Ghazni, and Wardak provinces - had long maintained a degree of internal autonomy. It was rugged terrain, difficult to administer, inhabited by predominantly Shia Muslim Hazara communities who had their own tribal structures and leadership. From the early 1880s, Abdur Rahman moved to end that autonomy. He imposed taxes, demanded military conscription, and sent administrators into Hazara territory with wide powers of enforcement.
Why the Hazara Rose Up
The grievances that drove the uprisings were concrete and cumulative. Abdur Rahman imposed a heavy tax burden on Hazara communities - including a per-person head tax (nafs tax), land levies, and arbitrary exactions by the administrators he placed in occupied villages. Land was confiscated and redistributed to Pashtun nomads (Kuchi). Hazara men were subject to forced conscription. Local chiefs were stripped of authority, arrested, or executed. Hazara communities were disarmed - a particularly consequential measure in a region where weapons were central to communal defense and daily life.
There was also a religious dimension that Abdur Rahman deliberately weaponized. The Hazara are predominantly Shia Muslims. Abdur Rahman, governing in the name of Sunni Islam, used sectarian framing to delegitimize Hazara resistance. He and the clerics aligned with his court issued decrees characterizing Shia Hazaras as heretics - not Muslims but unbelievers. A royal decree instructed clerics to announce after Friday prayers that Shia Hazaras could be exterminated or enslaved. He promised participating forces the land, property, women, and children of the Hazaras as legitimate spoils. This is documented in both contemporary Afghan sources and in the reports of British observers stationed in or near the region.
The combination - punishing taxation, land confiscation, forced conscription, disarmament, and religious delegitimization - created conditions that made armed resistance, however asymmetric, a rational choice for Hazara communities with no other recourse.
The First Uprising: 1888-1890
The initial uprising emerged in 1888, partly in connection with a broader dynastic conflict. When Abdur Rahman's cousin Mohammad Eshaq revolted against him, tribal leaders of the Sheikh Ali Hazaras - a major Hazara tribe in the northern Hazarajat - allied with the revolt. The reasoning was tactical as much as principled: any challenger to Abdur Rahman was a potential counterweight to the policies bearing down on them.
The revolt was short-lived. Abdur Rahman suppressed the Eshaq rebellion and turned his attention fully to the Sheikh Ali Hazaras. He exploited internal divisions within the community - pitting Sunni Hazara factions against Shia Hazara factions, making selective pacts, fragmenting the resistance. Chiefs Sawar Khan and Syed Jafar Khan continued to fight but were eventually defeated. Syed Jafar, chief of the Sheikh Ali Hazara tribe, was arrested and imprisoned in Mazar-e-Sharif. Afghan administrators moved into occupied areas. Taxes were imposed, villages looted, weapons seized, and better agricultural lands confiscated and handed to Kuchi nomads.
The pattern established in 1888-1890 would repeat, with greater intensity, in what followed.
The Second Uprising: Spring 1892
The second uprising broke out in the spring of 1892 under circumstances that illustrate how immediate and local triggers could ignite a broader revolt. According to Afghan historian Sayed Askar Mousavi, whose 1998 study The Hazaras of Afghanistan remains a standard reference, the immediate cause was an assault on the wife of a Hazara chieftain by Afghan soldiers. The chieftain's family - and the family of the wife - killed the soldiers responsible and attacked the local garrison. The incident spread. Several tribal leaders who had previously aligned with or tolerated Abdur Rahman reversed position and joined the rebellion. Within a short period, the uprising had spread across much of the Hazarajat.
The fighting at Uruzgan in August 1892 represents one of the most documented military engagements of the uprisings. On August 9, 1892, Uruzgani Hazara fighters defeated an Afghan government force under Brigadier Zabardast Khan decisively. When news of that defeat reached the government, Zabardast Khan's brother Faiz Mohammad Khan assembled a second force and marched on Uruzgan. That force too suffered significant losses - reportedly around 1,000 men - and Faiz Mohammad Khan and his remaining troops were besieged in a nearby Afghan fort. After approximately a month under siege, he surrendered to the Hazara.
These were genuine battlefield victories, achieved against professional government forces. They are not in the English-language canon of 19th-century Afghan history. Guldara and the broader Hazarajat zone saw fighting in this period as well, though detailed records of engagements outside Uruzgan are sparse in available English-language sources. Guldara, located in what is now Kabul Province, sat within the arc of territory Abdur Rahman's forces moved through in consolidating control over the region north of Kabul - a zone with documented Hazara resistance activity.
The Final Uprising and Its Defeat: 1893
The third and final major uprising began in early 1893, again triggered in large part by excessive and arbitrary taxation. This revolt surprised government forces with its speed and scope; Hazara fighters briefly recovered control over significant portions of the Hazarajat. But Abdur Rahman's response was overwhelming. He declared a formal jihad against the Shia Hazaras, mobilizing what sources describe as an army of up to 40,000 soldiers, 10,000 mounted troops, and approximately 100,000 armed civilians - the majority Pashtun nomads who had material incentives in the form of promised Hazara lands and property.
The decisive engagement came at Uruzgan in 1893. The Hazara were defeated at the center of their resistance. The uprising collapsed. What followed was not merely pacification - it was systematic destruction.
The Repression: Mass Killing, Enslavement, and Dispossession
The scale of what happened after the final defeat is the aspect of this history most likely to be entirely absent from any English-language account a reader might have encountered. Contemporary sources - Afghan, British Indian, and others - document it in enough detail to establish its basic character.
Fayz Muhammad Katib, a Hazara scholar who served as court chronicler under Amir Habibullah Khan (Abdur Rahman's successor), compiled the multi-volume Siraj al-Tawarikh (Lamp of Histories), which constitutes one of the most important primary sources for this period. Writing under the constraints of court employment, Katib nonetheless recorded accounts of widespread "slaughter and assault" across Hazara territories - the destruction of villages, the ruin of agricultural infrastructure, mass killing, and the enslavement of men, women, and children on a large scale. His account is not neutral - it was written in a court context, and scholars have debated what it omits and what it emphasizes - but its documentation of the scale of violence is broadly consistent with other sources.
British India colonial records provide an external corroboration. The Kabul Newsletters - written by British agents operating in or near Afghanistan - characterize Abdur Rahman as ruthless in his methods. Dr. John Alfred Gray, a British physician who served as personal doctor to Abdur Rahman Khan, documented seeing groups of Hazara women being marched through Kabul under military guard. He recorded that they became so numerous in the capital that the Amir would reward loyal servants and officers with them. British observers noted that the Amir had issued a decree legitimizing the enslavement of Hazaras and that the government levied taxes on slave sales - formal state involvement in the slave trade.
Estimates of the number of Hazara women enslaved in Kabul alone reach 9,000. Formal abolition of slavery in Afghanistan did not come until King Amanullah Khan's reign, in 1923.
Land confiscation followed the military campaigns. On April 11, 1894, orders were issued to confiscate all grazing lands in the Hazarajat. These were redistributed to Pashtun nomad leaders. Agricultural lands under Hazara cultivation were also seized. Entire Hazara tribal communities were forcibly displaced from their territories - the Uruzgani Hazaras were expelled from Uruzgan, with Afghan tribes resettled in their place. The land dispossession of the 1890s structured Hazara economic marginalization in central Afghanistan for decades to come.
Scholars today disagree about the precise population figures and a note of honesty is appropriate here: the evidentiary record is incomplete. Contemporary demographic data for this period does not exist in any systematic form. But the scholarly consensus - including Mehdi J. Hakimi's 2024 analysis in the Harvard Human Rights Journal, which undertakes the first examination of these events against international law - is that at least sixty percent of the Hazara population was killed, enslaved, or forcibly displaced during and after the uprisings. Some estimates place the pre-1880 Hazara share of Afghanistan's total population as high as two-thirds. By the early 20th century, they were a minority. The demographic shift was catastrophic and structural, not incidental.
What Was Lost and What Endured
The Hazarajat uprisings of 1888-1893 produced specific and lasting material consequences. The tribal leadership structures that had governed Hazara communities were dismantled - chiefs arrested, executed, or brought to Kabul as hostages. The weaponry that had enabled self-defense was confiscated. The land base that had sustained Hazara agricultural and pastoral life was redistributed to others. And the religious framing Abdur Rahman deployed - Hazaras as heretics, as legitimate targets of jihad - was not simply wartime propaganda. It entered the broader cultural and legal fabric of the Afghan state in ways that persisted long after his death in 1901.
The memory of this period did not disappear from Hazara communities. It remained, transmitted through oral traditions and, eventually, through the scholars who recovered it in writing. Fayz Muhammad Katib's Siraj al-Tawarikh is one such recovery, written from within the court that succeeded the perpetrator. Sayed Askar Mousavi's 1998 study brought the history into English-language academic circulation. Mehdi Hakimi's recent legal scholarship has begun to frame what happened in terms of international law and genocide convention definitions.
The uprisings themselves are evidence of something important: the Hazara did not accept what was being done to them passively. They organized, fought, won individual battles, and held out against a far larger and better-supplied enemy across three distinct cycles of revolt spanning five years. That record of resistance is part of what this period means - not only the devastation that followed but the scale of what the Hazara mounted before they were finally overwhelmed.
For those encountering this history for the first time - in any language - the central difficulty is the near-total absence of detailed English-language accounts of specific engagements, specific leaders, and specific locations. The Battle of Uruzgan in August 1892 is partially documented. Guldara and many other sites of resistance remain almost invisible in the historiography. Much of the detailed record survives, if it survives at all, in Dari-language sources, in the contested pages of Siraj al-Tawarikh, and in the administrative records of British India that have not been systematically translated or synthesized. That is not a reason to omit the history - it is a reason to name the gap honestly and to treat what we do know with the seriousness it deserves.
The 1890s are not prologue. They are origin. The political identity of Hazara communities in Afghanistan and around the world - the insistence on being seen, on having history named and acknowledged - did not emerge from nothing. It emerged, in substantial part, from a period when the Afghan state attempted to eliminate Hazara political existence entirely, and failed to do so completely, because the Hazara refused to disappear.
Sources and Further Reading
The following sources informed this article and are recommended for readers who want to go further:
- Sayed Askar Mousavi, The Hazaras of Afghanistan: An Historical, Cultural, Economic and Political Study (1998) - the key English-language scholarly study of Hazara history, covering the 1888-1893 uprisings in detail.
- Fayz Muhammad Katib, Siraj al-Tawarikh (Lamp of Histories) - multi-volume primary source in Dari; the court chronicle of Amir Habibullah Khan's reign, with significant documentation of the Abdur Rahman period. Partial translations and scholarly commentary are available.
- Mehdi J. Hakimi, "The Afghan State and the Hazara Genocide," Harvard Human Rights Journal, Vol. 37 (2024) - the first systematic legal analysis of the 1890s events against international law frameworks.
- Mehdi J. Hakimi, "Relentless Atrocities: the Persecution of Hazaras," Michigan Journal of International Law, Vol. 44 (2023).
- Abdur Rahman Khan, The Life of Abdur Rahman, Amir of Afghanistan (1900, ed. Sultan Mahomed Khan) - the Amir's own account; useful as a primary source for his perspective and framing, not as a neutral record.
- Encyclopedia MDPI entry on the 1888-1893 Uprisings of Hazaras - a useful summary of documented events with citations.
- Minority Rights Group International, "Hazaras in Afghanistan" - accessible overview of historical and contemporary persecution patterns.
Note on sources: English-language scholarship on the specific military engagements of the Hazara uprisings is limited. The most detailed accounts appear in Dari-language sources and in British India colonial administrative records (Kabul Newsletters, India Office Records) that have not been fully synthesized in academic publications. Casualty and demographic estimates from this period are contested; the 60 percent figure cited in this article represents scholarly consensus as synthesized by Hakimi (2024) and Mousavi (1998), not a figure derivable from contemporaneous census data, which did not exist.