Military Review English Edition May-June 2014 | Page 74
1st Lt. Chris Richelderfer, Executive Officer of Headquarters and Headquarters Troop, 1st Squadron, 91st Cavalry Regiment (Airborne), looks
at possible enemy positions during Operation Saray Has near Forward Operating Base Naray, Kunar Province, Afghanistan, 25 April 2006.
(U.S. Army, Sgt. Brandon Aird)
of genetics, archaeology, and linguistics allow us additional insights. We know that the inhabitants of Kunar
are mostly Pashtun of the Safi tribe, while those in the
Korengal and Weygal valleys, as well as the Nuristan
Province, are considered Nuristanis. Geography partitions these two groups. The Pashtun people are limited
to the valleys of the Kunar and Pech Rivers.2
The Nuristani tribes have as many as six languages, each with dialects—some numerous.3
Difficult travel over the extremely mountainous
terrain of the Kunar-Nuristan region has caused
many dialects of Nuristani languages to become
unintelligible to speakers living in adjacent valleys.
(Linguists cite the Dutch and Afrikaan languages
as an example of a relatively recent language split
causing a reduction in mutual intelligibility.4)
Although the Nuristani languages belong to the
Indo-Iranian family of languages, they are not
mutually intelligible with Farsi, Dari, or Pashto.
History and culture. From the written history
of the Pashtun Kingdom of Durrani Dynasty, we
know that the Nuristani people, originally referred
to as Kafiri (pagans), were the first inhabitants of
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the Kunar River valley. The Pashtun people have
advanced into the valleys over centuries, pushing
the Nuristanis further north and into the valleys
where they now reside. The Pashtun people had
united under the Durrani (formerly called Abdali)
tribe by the 1700s, while the Nuristanis have
remained splintered at the clan and village level.5
The Pashtuns became Muslims between the 7th and
10th centuries, while the Nuristanis resisted Islam
until the 1890s. The Pashtuns finally conquered all
of Nuristan between 1895 and 1896 under Emir
Abdul Rahman Khan.6 The Nuristanis were forcibly
converted but stil