[14] Khalilullah Khalili, a Kohistani poet laureate, depicted King Habibullah Kalakani as the "best manager of governmental imports and exports".

[21] Nevertheless, he deserted the unit at some unspecified time, and after working in Peshawar moved to Parachinar where he was arrested and sentenced to eleven months of imprisonment by the British.

[22] Kalakani began a life of banditry, since he considered the occupations common among the Kuhdamanis, like viticulture and selling firewood, to be beneath him, reasoning that these could hardly ever provide wheat bread for his table.

For three years, they lived in mountain caves, venturing out during the day to rob and hiding out at night, all the time fearful of government retaliation.

[22] While the Afghan Army was engulfed in battle with Pashtun outlaw tribes in Laghman and Nangarhar provinces in the east of the country, the Saqqawists, led by Kalakani began to attack the unprotected Kabul from the north in 1928.

Two days later, on 16 January 1929, Kalakani wrote a letter to King Inayatullah Khan to either surrender or prepare to fight.

[27] After several unsuccessful attempts, Nadir and his brothers finally raised a sufficiently large force—mostly from the British side of the Durand Line—to take Kabul on 13 October 1929.

"[10] His remains were laid below a hilltop mausoleum at an undisclosed location for 87 years, until a campaign in 2016 by some Tajiks and scholars who wanted him to be reburied in a better place.

[29] This caused days of political and slight sectarian tensions in Kabul - Tajiks and religious scholars, who consider Kalakani to have been a devout Muslim, wanted him to be buried at the Shahrara hill and asked President Ashraf Ghani to plan a state burial.

Opponents of Kalakani, mostly Pashtuns and secularists, were against this plan, including vice-president Abdul Rashid Dostum who claimed that he could not be buried at a hilltop important to Uzbek heritage.