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On the night of August 31, 2025, a powerful 6 magnitude earthquake struck northeastern Afghanistan. At least 800 people have been killed and thousands injured, mostly in the Nangarhar and Kunar provinces.
The province of Kunar forms one end of the so-called ‘Pashtun Crescent’, the other end being Farah province in the west on the Iranian border. The Crescent is the traditional homeland of the Pashtuns, the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and the second-largest in Pakistan (after the Punjabis).
But to anthropologists and Indologists, Kunar is important for another reason. The province is named after the Kunar river, which begins as the Chitral in neighbouring Pakistan. Along its 480 kilometre-long course, the river flows through the province of Nuristan (‘Land of Light’ in Pashto and Dari), which borders Kunar. Nuristan and Kunar are home to the Nuristanis, a people whose origins are shrouded in mystery, just like the equally mysterious Kalash across the border in Chitral, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.
For years, the fair-skinned and often blue-eyed Nuristanis and Kalash have befuddled anthropologists. Today though, genetics has discounted any major link to European populations. But more on that later.
First, let us try to understand the geography of Kunar.
Writing in 2008, Brian Glyn Williams noted in Afghanistan’s Heart of Darkness: Fighting the Taliban in Kunar Province that US soldiers fighting in Afghanistan had dubbed Kunar as the country’s ‘Heart of Darkness’.
There was a reason for this. Unlike the flat open plains or scrub covered desert mountains of the south, Kunar was covered in forested mountains similar to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, as per Williams.
“In Afghanistan, Kunar is a rare forested valley carved by the Kunar River, which flows 300 miles southward along the Pakistani-Afghan border from Chitral down to the Kabul River near Jalalabad. Along the way, the Kunar River is joined by numerous tributaries—such as the Pech Dara—that add to its flow. Kunar’s population is roughly 380,000. The north-south Kunar Valley parallels the Pakistani border and has been used as a corridor of communications between the uplands of Badakshan (Tajik territories to the north) and the Pashtun lands of the south for centuries,” he adds.
The residents of the Kunar Valley have been fighting guerilla warfare since the days of Alexander the Great.
“When he invaded, the local inhabitants burnt their houses and fled to wage guerrilla warfare against his troops, a style of warfare their descendants would continue right up until the modern era,” Williams notes.
Conqueror after conqueror noted the toughness of these fighters of Kunar. Among them were Mahmud of Ghazni, Timur and Babur.
The residents of the upper Kunar Valley were unique, for they were non-Muslims in what was an overwhelmingly Muslim zone till 1896. For centuries, they were referred to as ‘Kafirs’ or ‘Unbelievers’, from the Arabic ‘Kufr’ meaning ‘to disbelieve’. Their opponents and neighbours divided them into Siah posh (‘Black robed’) and Safed posh (‘White robed’) or Lal posh (‘Red robed’).
So, what exactly was the religious identity of these people?
“The vast majority of Kunar’s population is Pashtun, with the Pech-based Safi tribe the most prominent. Yet if one goes up the Kunar Valley, into the Pech and Korengal Valleys which reach up to the remote mountains of Nuristan, one encounters non-Pashtun tribes previously known as “Kafirs” (pagan unbelievers),” writes Williams.
In his paper, The Ṛgvedic Religious System and its Central Asian and Hindukush Antecedents, Michael Witzel writes that “To begin with, the valleys of Nuristan in E. Afghanistan inhabited by the Nuristani (Kafiri) speaking tribes that form a third branch of IIr., while the neighboring valleys of northern Pakistan are inhabited (apart from a few recent Nuristani immigrants that have arrived in Chitral over the past hundred years), by various Dardic (NIA) speaking Muslim populations such as the Kalash, Kho, Shina etc. Only the larger part of the Kalash, living in three of the western valleys of Chitral, have retained their old, pre-Islamic religion and rituals, while the rest of the Nuristani and Dardic speaking peoples have retained, as Muslims, only vestiges of their former beliefs.”
The Indo-Iranian language subfamily is a branch of the Indo-European language family, comprising the most widely spoken languages in the world. It is further divided into the Indo-Aryan and Iranian subfamilies.
Witzel notes a striking similarity between the Nuristanis, the Kalash and even Dardic groups like the Kashmiris of the Kashmir Valley. These groups “share some features that are general ‘Himalaya-Pamir-Hindukush’ and in all probability represent an ancient, common substrate,” he writes.
For instance, these ‘mountain religions’ (the pre-Islamic Kafirs and the Kalash) have common traits including the prominent role of shamans and items such as flat circular drums, various types of psychopharmaca and a general pattern of goat sacrifice, writes Witzel.
They also share a belief in mountain fairies, similar to the Apsaras or celestial nymphs in Hinduism and the Valkyries in Germanic folklore. “The Kalash distinguish between Suchi (sÏci), who are helpers in the hunt and in the killing of enemies, and the Varōti who are the more violent and angry male partners of the Suchi, reflecting the later Vedic (and typical medieval Kashmiri) distinction between Apsarases and Gandharvas,” writes Witzel.
He concludes that the Hindukush area shares many of the traits of Indo-Iranian myths, ritual, society, and echoes many aspects of Ṛgvedic, but hardly of post-Ṛgvedic religion. “In sum, all of these features of Hindukush religion are in need of further, much more detailed study, not just by anthropologists but certainly by Vedic specialists.”
While the Kalash have survived as a non-Muslim minority in three isolated valleys of Chitral, Pakistan, the Kafirs of Kafiristan were conquered in the 19th century after years of resistance.
“The Kafirs were conquered by the Afghan-Pashtun state in the 1890s and converted to the nur (light) of Islam; their land was renamed Nuristan,” writes Williams.
When the British first appeared in Afghanistan in the 1800s, the Kafirs of Kafiristan tried to draw a connection with them.
For centuries, oral traditions had circulated that the Kafirs and the Kalash were the descendants of Alexander’s soldiers, who did not return to Babylon. But modern genetics has proven this to be otherwise.
“However, previous admixture analysis implies a minor Greek contribution to the genetic pool of northern Pakistani populations, demonstrating that they share a similar Indo-European origin that predates Alexander’s conquest,” according to a 2025 paper titled Phylogenetic analysis of the enigmatic Kalash population in Pakistan.
The British too, seemingly threw the Kafirs under the bus.
“When Abdur Rahman invaded Kafiristan “the resistance was carried on by brave, undisciplined men, fighting in defence of all that is most cherished by the human race; only armed with bows and arrows, knives and some few firearms. The invaders opposed the Kafirs with the most murderous weapons of destruction that England can produce. . . the losses sustained and the sufferings endured by men, women, and children during the conflict and during their deportation to the neighhourhood of Jullalabad and elsewhere can never become known… Had not the [British] Government purposely withheld to the last moment the publication of the Durand Treaty of 1893, and the supplementary agreement of 1895, much might have been done to mitigate the sufferings of the unoffending Kafirs;” Neville Bowles Chamberlain, who saw action in both the Afghan Wars, wrote in Our Treatment of the Kafirs. (The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art. Vol. 81, London, 1896)
Today, the Nuristanis are overwhelmingly Muslim. But their past still offers us a window to a cultural crossroads, where India met with Central and West Asia.