The Zagros Mountain Range serves as a seemingly perfect natural border between Iran, Iraq and Turkey. Native to its rough terrain are the Kurds, a people who have mostly featured on the sidelines whilst Turkish, Arab and Persian dynasties went on to shape the region. But their culture is a martial one and throughout the course of history, the warrior-like ethnic groups always have a chance of establishing their dominance. The death of the great conqueror Nader Shah Afshar brought about such an opportunity for the Kurdish Zand Dynasty to rule much of Iran. Their rule started off strong on the back of their founder, rising as the premier Iranian based Empire of their day. But soon their courts were filled with the blood of kin slaying in contest for the throne. This interfamily feud would eventually see their painful fall from grace. So join me as I explore how the Kurds abandoned the sidelines of the Zagros Mountains to become game changers in the turbulent world of 18th century Iranian politics. Before delving into this story, we must first address the Kurdish origins of the Zand. The Zand tribe hails from a people known as the Laks, who themselves identify as being part of the Lur people. The Laki language is considered a dialect of the Kurdish language. As a result, the Laks have been viewed by many linguists and historians as part of the Kurdish ethnic group. In all likelihood, due to the close proximity these groups lived in, the Zand are a hybrid between Kurd and Lur. The founder of the Zand Dynasty was Karim Khan Zand, who was born in 1705 in a small village in the province of Hamadan in Western Iran. His father, Inaq Zand, was a tribal chieftain. After Karim was born, his parents had another son named Sadeq Zand who will be important in the story later on. The Zand lived in the Safavid Empire, which was established by the teenager Ismail I, who himself had Kurdish roots. At the time of Karim’s birth, the Safavids had fallen on hard times - weak rulers, external and internal threats were all starting to unravel the once mighty empire of Shah Abbas the Great. In the 1720s, this period of weak rule would come to a head. The tribes of Afghans led by Mahmud Hotak would take the Safavid capital of Isfahan and force the Safavid Shah to abdicate. In his place, Mahmud Hotak would declare himself Shah of Persia. The Hotak’s lasted less than decade before they were forced back to Afghanistan by a Turkic warlord named Nader Qoli, who we know better as Nader Shah, the last of the great Asiatic Conquerors. In 1730 he would turn towards the Ottoman Empire, which had been chipping away at Western Iran since the fall of the Safavids. This meant they were encroaching on Kurdish and Luri lands. As a result, these two groups, in addition to the Bakhtiari’s, were caught in the middle. Nader Shah soon neutralized the Ottomans and defeated the different mountainous people; sending thousands of Kurds and Bakhtiari to the easternmost edges of Iran in Khurasan. The able fighting men who survived Nader’s conquest were conscripted into his army; among them being Karim Khan Zand, who became a low-ranking horseman in Nader’s army. Whilst in the employment of Nader, Karim was poorly paid and later re-told stories of how he had to resort to theft to get by. For the next decade, Nader Shah would continue in his conquests across Asia building a sizeable empire. In 1747, with the glory days of his conquests behind him, Nader marched on Khurasan to put down a rebellion of Kurds that he had moved there. On this campaign he would be assassinated by a group of his officers who feared for their lives due to the increasingly unstable state of their leader’s mind. After this, the empire he had built started to fall apart. Chaos reigned in Iran as rebellions sprung up in every corner of the Afsharid Empire. Many of the people that Nader had forcefully moved across his empire began to shuffle back to their homelands. Among them being the Zand and Bakhtiari, who made an odyssey across the heartland of Iran before reaching the Zagros Mountains in the West. By the point of this return trip, Inaq Zand, the father of Karim Khan had passed away, leaving him as the new chief of the Zand. It didn’t take long for conflict to erupt between the Zands and Bakhtiari’s. Karim Khan Zand found himself frequently fighting with the Bakhtiari Chieftain Ali Mardan, before setting their differences aside in order to besiege the former imperial capital of Isfahan. In 1750 they succeeded in storming the city, re-enthroning the Safavid Dynasty by appointing a puppet ruler for legitimizing purposes. The very next year this Zand-Bakhtiari alliance would break down when Karim Khan pushed his rival Ali Mardan out of Isfahan. The Bakhtiari Chieftain retreated to Ottoman-controlled Basra, where he plotted for his next campaign. He found an ally in Azad Khan Afghan, a Pashtun warlord who had taken much of modern-day Azerbaijan following the death of Nader Shah. In 1753 Ali Mardan restarted his invasion from the west, whilst Azad Afghan attacked from the north. They thought they had a trump card in the form of a Safavid prince named Husayn, who they wanted to enthrone as a puppet ruler. Shortly after the campaign began, Husayn was discovered to be a fraud - he was in fact a peasant boy from Armenian or Azeri origin. When the army learned of this, much of them abandoned Ali Mardan. His partner, Azad Khan Afghan was defeated by the Zand after capturing the Northern Zagros Mountains. Karim Khan would finally get rid of his Bakhtiari rival in 1754 when he was killed by Zand’s 2 cousins. Establishing a base in southwestern Iran, Karim Khan then turned his attention to the north to neutralize Azad Khan in Tabriz. The Afghan had impressively asserted himself as a major warlord despite being a Sunni foreigner without any traditional powerbase amongst Persian society. But by 1757 he had lost all his territories to the Zands in the south and the Qajars of Mazandaran to his east. Karim Khan now found another rival in Mohammad Qajar. In 1758, the Qajar leader invaded and plunged so deep into Zand lands that he reached Karim’s stronghold, the city of Shiraz. Although he could not take the city as the Zand defiantly held them back. Echoing the turbulent nature of Iranian politics in this period, the Qajar were then pushed all the way back to the Caspian Sea, where a rival tribe killed Mohamad Qajar the following year. Karim Khan soon captured his two sons Hossein and Agha Mohammad. The latter was a Eunuch due to being castrated at the age of 6 by the Afsharids. To ensure Qajar loyalty, Karim Khan took Agha captive back to his stronghold of Shiraz where he would join his aunt, a member of the Zand ruler’s harem. During his stay at the Shirazi court, Agha was treated with respect and even gained the trust of Karim Zand, becoming a highly sought-after political advisor. While Agha was missing in some departments, his shrewdness was above many other more physically complete men. By 1760, Karim Khan Zand had defeated his biggest rivals and ruled all of Iran, except for Khurasan which was ruled by the blind and puppet grandson of Nader Shah and subject to the suzerainty of the Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah Durrani to the east. What followed was a period of peace and stability. For the first time in a long time, Iran prospered and recovered from decades of nonstop warfare. He refused to promote himself to the rank of Shah, preferring his title of Deputy of the People, which seemed fair as his reign is seen as re-establishing law and order. Karim Khan kept his bureaucratic circle small, choosing to be a benevolent dictator with all power of decision being his. He would embellish his capital Shiraz, woth a flurry of building projects in the city, many of which still stand today. In 1775 this peace was disrupted by war with the Ottoman Empire. Due to border tensions that involved Kurdish principalities, the Zands felt emboldened enough to wage war against the Sultan in Constantinople. Karim Khan would send his brother, Sadeq Zand with 30,000 soldiers to take the city of Basra. After a year-long siege the garrison was starved out. The Ottoman response was weak as the city at the tip of the Persian Gulf fell into Zand hands. In late 1778, over 70 years old, Karim Khan Zand fell ill with what was likely Tuberculosis. He would die the following March, after ruling for 38 years as Deputy of the People. Upon his death, a struggle for the throne took place. His half-brother, and two of his sons meeting their ends after holding onto power for a combined 5 months. Karim’s brother, Sadeq Zand then took the title of Shah, settling the issue of succession. In this time a massacre of the royal family took place which saw many of their most prominent members die. In this chaos Agha Qajar escaped after 16 years of captivity. Returning to his homeland, he consolidated the Qajar clan and began a rebellion against Zand rule. Sadeq Zand then sent an army, led by Ali-Morad Zand north to deal with Agha Qajar. They were defeated and on their return trip, Ali-Morad started a rebellion, deciding to march on Shiraz. After taking the city, Sadeq Zand would die shortly after in circumstances that we are not sure of. Ali-Morad declared himself Khan of Iran in 1781. In 1784 he sent an army to put down Agha Qajar in the north but the campaign met little success. In the meantime, Sadeq Zand’s son Jafar Zand, made his play for power and captured Isfahan. Ali-Morad would die soon after in mysterious circumstances as he tried to reclaim the city. By this point Agha Qajar had built a small empire across Persia. The Zand had ignored him for too long and he was now able to march on Isfahan. Encouraged by his successful capture of the city, he then sought to conquer none other than the Zand capital of Shiraz. He would fail this time, due to the city’s impressive fortifications but the writing was on the wall for the Zands. The city of Isfahan was then traded four times in four years by Jafar Zand and Agha Qajar, before Agha finally wrestled control of Isfahan in 1789. Even with the threat of Qajar annihilation, the Zand could not stop fighting each other. The son of Ali-Morad, Sayed Zand took his revenge on Jafar Zand by poisoning him. However, the poison did not kill Jafar, only leaving him ill. Sayed and a group of accomplices then overpowered Jafar in his weakened state and beheaded him. With that, Sayed became the new ruler. The son of Jafar, Loft-Ali Zand then marched on Shiraz, taking the city and executing his father’s executioner, Sayed Zand. Agha Qajar was already marching on Shiraz when Loft-Ali named himself as Shah. Loft-Ali met Agha outside of Shiraz where he was defeated and forced into a siege. The Qajars were once again unable to take the city, withdrawing north. In 1792 Loft-Ali marched to recapture Isfahan, but before he could take it, his capital of Shiraz defected to Agha Qajar. Agha rushed to accept the submission of Shiraz. Now Loft-Ali’s last hope at restoring the Zand Empire was to beat the Qajar army before they reached Shiraz. He surprised his Qajar foe, attacking their encampment at night. The Qajar were routed and Loft-Ali slept happy that night. In the morning he awoke to see the Qajar had regrouped and continued their march onto Shiraz. Loft-Ali retreated east, as his capitol fell. The Qajar army gave pursuit as he continued his prolonged retreat for another two years before being captured and handed over to Agha Qajar. After this the young Loft-Ali was blinded and tortured before meeting his death in 1794, ending the short-lived Zand Dynasty. The Zand’s dominance was short lived but it did offer respite Iran respite from decades of incessant fighting. In the end, their lack of ability to build a strong and sustainable governmental infrastructure as well as the bitter infighting which started as soon as Karim Khan died, destined it to be on top for only a brief flash of time.
