Abdur Rahman Khan, installed as emir in 1880, spent two decades imposing central authority on regions that had governed themselves. Between 1891 and 1893 his forces, reinforced by tribal militias promised land and captives and operating under a declaration of jihad against the Shia Hazaras, fought a war in the Hazarajat in which villages were destroyed, men killed, women and children sold in slave markets, and land redistributed to Pashtun tribes; survivors fled to Quetta in British India and to Mashhad in Iran, where their descendants remain. In 1895-96 the emir conquered Kafiristan, converted its population by force and renamed it Nuristan. He also carried out the naqlin, the transfer of Ghilzai Pashtun families to the Uzbek and Turkmen lands north of the Hindu Kush, to hold the frontier and dilute non-Pashtun majorities, a policy whose effects still shape northern Afghanistan's demography. Hazara organisations describe the campaigns as genocide; the term is contested among historians, some of whom emphasise the campaigns' political and fiscal aims and the absence of measurable population data.
The Afghan emir Abdur Rahman Khan conquered the Hazarajat and Kafiristan, enslaved and displaced their populations and moved Pashtun communities north
No defensible denominator exists. Afghanistan held no census until 1979, and estimates of the nineteenth-century Hazara population derive from British Indian political officers' reports and from the emir's own court chronicle, the Siraj al-Tawarikh, neither of which is a count. The widely repeated claim that more than half the Hazara were killed, enslaved or driven out rests on these same sources and cannot be given a denominator without circularity.
No count exists and none of the figures in circulation rests on records. Contemporary British political officers described very heavy Hazara losses in 1891-93, and accounts agree that killing, enslavement and flight together removed a large share of the population from the Hazarajat, but the proportion is an estimate.
British Indian political reporting and Hazara and Nuristani accounts describe massacres, enslavement, the burning of villages and forced conversion in Kafiristan.
Afghanistan, Pakistan