Kunduz is the lowland of Afghanistan’s north-east: a broad plain where the Kunduz River runs north to the Amu Darya, which forms the province’s border with Tajikistan. Some four-fifths of the province is flat land, and its irrigated fields have long made it one of the country’s leading farming regions. The capital, also called Kunduz, stands near the meeting of the Kunduz and Khanabad rivers, about 350 metres above sea level.
A river from the mountains
The Kunduz River gathers its water far to the south, in the highlands of Bamyan and Baghlan, and passes Pul-e Khumri before reaching the plain; another branch rises in the mountains of Badakhshan and Takhar and flows past Taloqan. Most villages and fields lie close to the river and its canals. Farmers grow wheat, rice, cotton, flax, maize, mung beans, almonds and vegetables, and keep sheep, cattle and camels.
The climate is semi-arid, with hot, almost rainless summers and cool winters; most of the year’s rain falls between January and April.
From Bactria to Qataghan
Kunduz lies in historic Tokharistan, part of ancient Bactria, and the city is believed to stand on the site of ancient Drapsaka. In late antiquity it was called Warwaliz, a name built on a Bactrian word for fortress, while the modern name is usually traced to the Persian kohan dezh, “old fort”. Ibn Battuta passed through in the fourteenth century on the road from Balkh to India and found the district still scarred by the Mongol invasions.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Kunduz was the seat of an Uzbek khanate which, under Mohammad Murad Beg (1815–1842), reached from Balkh to the Pamir. It was brought into the Afghan state in 1859, and the region later formed part of the large province of Qataghan until the administrative reorganisation of 1964.
Cotton and many peoples
In 1935 a private joint-stock company was formed to grow cotton on newly reclaimed marshland around Kunduz and Baghlan, and its tenants had to sow part of every farm with cotton. The company, later renamed Spinzar — Pashto for “white gold” — built ginneries, an oil mill and a soap factory at Kunduz, and cotton became the great cash crop of the north. By the 1970s Spinzar’s Kunduz oil mill was the largest in the country.
Kunduz has a notably mixed population. Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmen and Hazaras all live here, along with smaller groups such as the Pashai and a local Arab community that speaks Dari and Pashto. Turkmen families are known across the north as skilled carpet weavers.