Sar-e Pol, whose name means ‘bridgehead’, is one of Afghanistan’s younger provinces, created in 1988 in the uplands south of Jowzjan. Its capital, however, is probably an old town: scholars identify it with Anbar, a flourishing city of medieval Gowzgan where the local Farighunid princes spent their winters.
Mountains and rivers
Most of the province is upland. About three-quarters of its roughly 16,400 square kilometres is mountainous or hilly and only about a seventh is flat, with the most rugged country in the south. The capital lies at about 610 metres on the middle course of the Ab-e Safid, upstream from Sheberghan, and the Balkhab river also flows through the province.
Sar-e Pol borders Jowzjan and Balkh to the north, Samangan to the east, Bamyan and Ghor to the south and Faryab to the west. Its seven districts, among them Balkhab, Kohistanat, Sancharak, Sayyad, Gosfandi and Sozma Qala, hold almost 900 villages.
Anbar, winter seat of Gowzgan
Tenth-century geographers describe Anbar as larger than Marv al-Rud, rich in vineyards and orchards, and set at the foot of a mountain. The Hudud al-Alam calls it a trading post for Balkh, visited by merchants and exporting the much-prized Gowzgani leather. The Farighunid princes kept their winter residence here and spent the summer higher up, in the mountain district of Jorzovan. In the first Islamic centuries, too, the Arab governors of the region had resided at Anbar, while the local princes kept their seat at Yahudiya, today’s Maymana.
Anbar also appears in the story of Naser-e Khosrow, the Persian poet and thinker. In 1045–46 he spent a month in the chief town of Jowzjan, before the dream that sent him on the pilgrimage to Mecca and the long journey he described in his Safarnama. After this, Anbar disappears from the historical record.
From the early 16th to the mid-18th century the area was ruled from Bukhara, and around 1750 it became part of the Durrani kingdom of Ahmad Shah.
People of the valleys
Sar-e Pol is home to Uzbeks, Hazaras and Pashtuns, with Tajik villages becoming more common towards the south, and Dari, Uzbek, Pashto and Turkmen are all spoken. The NSIA estimated the population at about 632,000 in 2021–22.
Farming in the irrigated valleys is the backbone of local life, and mining is the other main industry. The mix of lowland oases and high mountain valleys gives the province a character of its own, halfway between the plains of the north and the highlands of central Afghanistan.