Victory Point - Ed Darack [8]
But those early inhabitants lived just outside the intersection of routes of migration and conquest between central, southern, and western Asia. A number of different empires swallowed the land that would become Afghanistan over the years, but none of these conquerors ever firmly established any type of rule over the people in that part of the Hindu Kush that today is the Kunar province, where ⅔’s Marines would conduct the majority of their combat operations during their tour.
In 330 BC, Alexander III of Macedonia, aka Alexander the Great, led his army into what would become Afghanistan during his infamous march toward the fertile Indo-Gangetic plains of India. While the military leader established outposts and conquered cities around the greater Hindu Kush (Hindu Kush roughly translates as “pass of India”), the fiercely independent people of these mountainous hinterlands savaged his men—as did the Hindu Kush itself, with its cold temperatures and crushing winter snowfall. Alexander split his army in two upon returning to Kabul, sending one branch toward the Indus via the Kabul River, and personally leading the others up the Kunar Valley—passing the opening of the Chowkay Valley—and then crossing into what would become Pakistan at the Nawa Pass in 326 BC (many sources incorrectly state that Alexander passed through the Khyber Pass, forty miles to the south).
Shaded relief map of Afghanistan’s eastern provinces
Invasions continued throughout the centuries following Alexander’s foray, infusing religious and cultural ideologies from throughout Eurasia into the region, including Buddhism, as evidenced to this day by the numerous Buddhist artifacts and large statues that archaeologists continue to unearth. Despite such outside influences, however, the people of the hidden valleys in the region of the Chowkay, including the nearby Korangal, Shuryek, Narang, and the Pech River Valleys—all of which lay in the shadows of the enormous massif known as Sawtalo Sar—remained virtually untouched.
In roughly 650 AD, Arabs arrived, bringing with them a wholly new religious ideology: Islam. Fervent Muslim adherents spread their new faith throughout the region, often through forced conversion. But then an even more heavy-handed force descended upon this part of the world, Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes, who decimated cities, wiped out entire regional populations, and left much of what would become Afghanistan devoid of humanity. And still, the hidden communities of the Hindu Kush continued as they had for thousands of years.
This isolation would, however, come to an end with the arrival of people from a place called Parsua, a mountainous region of Persia. This group migrated east, flooding into the valleys and onto the low ridges of the Hindu Kush. They were known as the Pashtun, a name that loosely translates as “people of the hills,” derived from the place-name Parsua, and fierce independence and tight familial bonds defined their culture. During this influx, Islam again surged as a religion, specifically, the Sunni branch of Islam, as the Pashtuns adopted this ideology and helped to further its reach. Although they were traditionally divided along tribal and subtribal lines, both their language, Pashto, and their religion united the Pashtuns as a broad and far-reaching group. The Pashtuns, deft at military conquest and the annexation of others’ land, soon dominated the region culturally and religiously.
As the Pashtuns pushed ever higher into the mountains of the Hindu Kush in the vicinity including the Chowkay, Korangal, Pech, and Shuryek valleys, the local inhabitants, who wished to have nothing to do with the outside world (the “outside world” being defined by the ridgelines surrounding their tiny villages), vehemently resisted their advances. The Pashtuns, however, overpowered the locals