The present city of Kandahar was founded in the 4th century BC by Alexander the Great, near the site of the ancient city of Mundigak (established around 3000 BC). The city has been a frequent target for conquest because of its strategic location in Central Asia. It was part of the Iranian Achaemenid empire and came under the influence of the Indian emperor Ashoka and the Kushan emperor Kanishka. It was also known as Alexandropolis, after its founder, Alexander.
Kandahar was dominated early by various Iranian tribes, but the Pashtuns would remain the most prominent group during most of its history.
Under the Abbasids and later Turkic invaders, Kandahar was conquered by Muslims who converted the local Pashtuns and the city came under the influence of the Khurasan region, while retaining its local Pashtun language and culture. It was conquered by Arabs (7th century), Turkic Ghaznavids (10th century), Genghis Khan (12th century), and Timur (1383).
Babur, founder of the Mughal empire, annexed Kandahar in 16th century. His son, Humayun, lost Kandahar to the Shah of Persia. Humayun's son Akbar regained control of Kandahar and Kabul, but subsequent Mughal emperors lost the territory.
It became part of an early Pashtun state in 1708 when conquered by Mir Waiz. He died in 1715 and from 1738-1747 the city was temporarily in the hands of the Turko-Iranian ruler Nadir Shah.
Ahmad Shah Durrani, the founder of Afghanistan, gained control of the city in 1747 and made it the capital (1748) of his new Afghan (Pashtun) kingdom. The (now) old city was laid out by Ahmad Shah and is dominated by his mausoleum. In the 1780s, however, the capital was transferred to Kabul.
Qandahar has sometimes a centre of Jihad and mujahedin activity, but local Pashtun tribes tended to live by their pre-Islamic code of honour known as Pashtunwali. On 28th Muharram 1242 Hijri (2nd September 1826 C.E.) Syed Ahmad Shaheed's forces reached Qandahar en route to Peshawar. Their purpose was to wage a jihad against the Sikh kingdom of Ranjit Singh and aid their fellow Pashtuns of Peshawar, and within a few days more than 400 Qandaharis presented themselves for jihad, out of whom 270 were selected. Syed Deen Muhammad Qandahari was appointed their leader.
British forces occupied the city during the First Anglo-Afghan War (1839-1842) and from 1879 to 1881. Kandahar became part of the modern state of Afghanistan nonetheless.
During the Soviet occupation of 1979-1989, Kandahar was firmly under Soviet command. After the Soviet withdrawal it changed hands several times.
Since the American incursion, the Pederasty of Kandahar has been popularized. The practice consists of an older man taking a young lover. The city is famous throughout Afghanistan for this, and has given rise to the humorous proverb that when birds fly over Kandahar they flap one wing only, covering their behinds with the other.
It was toward the end of 1994 that the Taliban emerged from the city and set out to conquer the south, east, and centre of the country. Since the removal of the Taliban in 2001-02, smaller bands have spread throughout the nearby provinces, and Kandahar came under the control of Gul Agha Shirzai, a Pashtun warlord who had controlled the province and city before the rise of the Taliban, and who was credited with permitting the same corruption that first fueled the growth of the Taliban. The city remains under Shirzai's control. The Taliban remains popular amongst some of the local Pashtun inhabitants. Central Afghan control remains little more than symbolic at present.