Lashkar Gah - History

History

Lashkar Gah means "army barracks" in Persian language. The area was part of the Saffarids in the 9th century. It grew up a thousand years ago as a riverside barracks town for soldiers accompanying the Ghaznavid nobility to their grand winter capital of Bost. The ruins of the Ghaznavid mansions still stand along the Helmand River; the city of Bost and its outlying communities were sacked in successive centuries by the Ghorids, Mongols, and Timurids. However, the region was later rebuilt by Timur (Timur Lang).

By the late 16th century the city and region was governed by the Safavid dynasty. It became part of the Afghan Hotaki Empire in 1709. It was invaded by the Afsharid forces in 1738 on their way to Kandahar. By 1747 it became part of the Durrani Empire or modern Afghanistan. The British arrived in or about 1840 during the First Anglo-Afghan War but left about year later. The city was used by Ayub Khan in the Second Anglo-Afghan War until 1880 when the British helped return it to Abdur Rahman Khan. It remained peaceful for the next 100 years.

The modern city of Lashkar Gah was used as a headquarters for United States Army Corps of Engineers working on the Helm-and Valley Authority (HVA) irrigation project in the 1950s, modeled after the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in the United States. Lashkar Gah was built using American designs, with broad tree-lined streets and brick houses with no walls separating them from the street. In the wake of the Soviet invasion and the long Afghan civil war, the trees mostly came down and walls went up.

The massive Helmand irrigation project in the 1940s–1970s created one of the most extensive farming zones in southern Afghanistan, opening up many thousands of hectares of desert to human cultivation and habitation. The project focused on three large canals: the Boghra, Shamalan, and Darweshan. Responsibility for maintaining the canals was given to the Helmand and Arghandab Valley Authority (HAVA), a semi-independent government agency whose authority (in its heyday) rivaled that of the provincial governors.

After the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989 and the collapse of Mohammad Najibullah's government in 1992, the city was taken over by the Mujaheddin forces. In the mid 1990s it fell to the Taliban government. In late 2001, the Taliban were removed from power by the United States armed forces. Since 2002, the city and region was occupied by United States Marine Corps and the International Security Assistance Force. After training and equipping Afghan security forces, the foreign armies tranferred security responsibility to the military of Afghanistan and Afghan National Police in 2011. They city has witnessed some fighting in the form of attacks orchestrated by the Taliban insurgents.