[9] The change of the name from "Scandar" to Candar is mentioned by the 16th-century Portuguese historian João de Barros in his most famous work, Décadas da Ásia.

Islamic conquest Until the 9th century, the Kandahar region was ruled by the Zunbil dynasty and considered part of the Indian Subcontinent, though it was an Eastern Iranic realm which followed Zurvanism.

[22] In the 7th century AD, Arab armies conquered the region but failed to convert the entire population to Islam.The leader of the expedition was Abbad ibn Ziyad, who governed Sijistan between 673 and 681.

[23] In AD 870, Yaqub ibn Layth Saffari, a local ruler of the Saffarid dynasty, conquered Kandahar and environs in the name of Islam.

The city's name was changed back to Kandahar by the 13th century, after Ala ad-Din Husayn Jahansuz sacked Lashkari Bazar, near Bost.

Akbar died in 1605 and when this news reached the Persian court, Shah Abbas ordered his army to besiege the city which continued until early 1606 and finally failed due to the reinforcements sent by the Mughal Emperor Jahangir that forced the Safavid retreat.

[28] The memory of the wars fought over Kandahar at this time is preserved in the epic poem Qandahār-nāma ("The Campaign Against Qandahār"), a major work of Saib Tabrizi which is a classic of Persian literature.

Mirwais Hotak, chief of the Ghilji tribe, revolted in 1709 by killing Gurgin Khan, an ethnic Georgian subject and governor of the Shia Safavid Persians.

He died of a natural death in November 1715 and was succeeded by his brother Abdul Aziz, but after being suspected of giving Kandahar's sovereignty back to the Persians he was killed by his nephew Mahmud Hotak.

Before leaving southern Afghanistan for Delhi in India, Nader Shah laid out the foundation for a new town to be built next to the destroyed ancient city, naming it "Naderabad".

By 1776, his eldest son Timur Shah had transferred Afghanistan's main capital, due to several conflicts with various Pashtun tribes, from Kandahar to Kabul, where the Durrani legacy continued.

In September 1826, Syed Ahmad Shaheed's followers arrived to Kandahar in search of volunteers to help them wage jihad against the Sikh invaders to what is now Pakistan.

Kandahar remained peaceful for the next 100 years, except during 1929 when loyalists of Habibullah Kalakani (Bache Saqqaw) placed the fortified city on lock-down and began torturing its population.

This lasted until October 1929 when Nadir Khan and his Afghan army came to eliminate Kalakani, known as the Tajik bandit from the village of Kalakan in northern Kabul Province.

Although Kandahar remained less international than Kabul, with fewer foreigners in residence and thus no market for coffee, jam, potatoes, or other European produce, a modest German community took root there in the 1930s.

[40] The city's population was reduced from 200,000 before the war to no more than 25,000 inhabitants, following a months-long campaign of carpet bombing and bulldozing by the Soviets and Afghan communist soldiers in 1987.

By the spring of 1994, the nucleus of the Taliban emirate had begun to take shape, and that year, they launched operations to dismantle warlord militia checkpoints around the city.

In October 2001, as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, the United States Navy began hitting targets inside the city by precision-guided cruise missiles that were fired from the Persian Gulf.

The next day an Islamic cleric (mulla) of the famous Red Mosque in the Shahr-e Naw area of the city and a number of other people were killed by a Taliban suicide bomber who had hidden explosives inside his turban.

There is a bus station located at the start of the Kabul-Kandahar Highway, where a number of privately owned older-model Mercedes-Benz coach buses are available to take passengers to most major cities of the country.

Due to the ongoing war, the route to Kabul has become increasingly dangerous as insurgent attacks on convoys and destruction of bridges make it an unreliable link between the two cities.

Kochi people (Pashtun Nomads) also live in Kandahar province, and their numbers fluctuate depending on the season, with estimates stating approximately 79,000 in the winter and 39,000 in the summer.

A 2006 compendium of provincial data prepared by the Afghan Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development and United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) states: "The major ethnic group living in Khandahar province is Pashtoons.

[citation needed] Nearly all of the elite class of the city fled to neighboring Pakistan during the early 1980s, and from there they began immigrating to North America, Europe, Australia and other parts of the world.

There are a number of new schools that opened in the last decade, with more being built in the future as the city's population grows with the large returning Afghans from neighboring countries.

Kandahar Museum is located at the western end of the third block of buildings lining the main road east of Eidgah Durwaza (gate).

Just to the north of the city, off its northeast corner at the end of buria (matting) bazaar, there is a shrine dedicated to a saint who lived in Kandahar more than 300 years ago.

The grave of Hazratji Baba, 7.0 m (23 ft) long to signify his greatness, but otherwise covered solely by rock chips, is undecorated save for tall pennants at its head.

The rugged cliffs from which the Chilzina was hewn form the natural western bastion of the Old City of Kandahar, which was destroyed in 1738 by Nadir Shah Afshar of Persia.

Decades of war left Kandahar and the rest of the country destroyed and depopulated, but in recent years billions of dollars began pouring in for construction purposes and millions of expats have returned to Afghanistan.