Battle of Damghan

Infobox Military Conflict
conflict=Battle of Damghan


caption=
date=September 1729
place= Mehmandust near Damghan
result=Afsharid victory.
combatant1=Afsharid Empire
combatant2=Ghilzai Pashtuns
commander1=Nader Shah
commander2=Ashraf Khan
strength1=
strength2=
casualties1=
casualties2=

The Battle of Damghan was fought in September 1729, near the city of Damghan, between Iranian rebels and the Hotaki army under Ashraf Khan. The Iranians were led by Nāder Qoli Beg, and consisted of mainly Turkmen tribesmen of the northern Afshar, [Michael Axworthy's biography of Nader, "The Sword of Persia" (I.B. Tauris, 2006), p.17-19: "His father was of lowly but respectable status, a herdsman of the Afshar tribe ... The Qereqlu Afshars to whom Nader's father belonged were a semi-nomadic Turcoman tribe settled in Khorasan in north-eastern Iran ... The tribes of Khorasan were for the most part linguistically distinct from the Persian-speaking population, speaking Turkic or Kurdish languages. Nader's mother tongue was a dialect of the language group spoken by the Turkic tribes of Iran and Central Asia, and he would have quickly learned Persian, the language of high culture and the cities as he grew older; But the Turkic language was always his preferred everyday speech, unless he was dealing with someone who knew only Persian."] while the Hotaki army consisted of mostly ethnic Pashtun tribesmen, of the Ghilzai. The battle was followed by another one in Murcheh-Khort, a village near Isfahan. Nadir Beg's forces were victorious in both battles, which led him to remove the Hotaki dynasty from the Iranian throne. The Ghilzai were forced back to their territory in southern Afghanistan. [Packard Humanities Institute - Persian Literature in Translation - Chapter IV: "An Outline Of The History Of Persia During The Last Two Centuries"... [http://persian.packhum.org/persian/pf?file=90001014&ct=29 THE AFGHÁN INVASION (A.D. 1722-1730)] ]

References