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 72 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