Description : Kunduz (/kʊnduːz/; Pashto: کندز; Dari: قندوز original name: کُهَندِژ) is a city in northern Afghanistan, which serves as the capital of Kunduz Province. The city has a population of about 268,893, making it about the 6th-largest city of Afghanistan, and the largest city in the northeastern section of the country. Kunduz is located in the historical Tokharistan region of Bactria, near the confluence of the Kunduz River with the Khanabad River. Kunduz is linked by highways with Kabul to the south, Mazar-i-Sharif to the west, and Badakhshan to the east. Kunduz is also linked with Dushanbe in Tajikistan to the north, via the Afghan dry port of Sherkhan Bandar. Kunduz is the site of the ancient city of Drapsaka. It was a great centre of Buddhist learning and very prosperous during the 3rd century AD. The city used to be called Walwalij (or Varvarliz) and the name Kuhandiz began to be used from the Timurid time. In the 18th and 19th centuries it was the capital of a rather large eponymous, sometimes independent, sometimes autonomous Uzbek-Tajik khanate that in the 1820s encompassed land from Balkh to the Pamir Mountains. It was part of The Great Game between the British and Russians. This khanate was finally destroyed by Afghanistan in 1859. Between one-hundred and two-hundred thousand Tajiks and Uzbeks fled the conquest of their homeland by Russian Red Army and settled in northern Afghanistan. In the early 20th century, under the governance of Sher Khan Nasher, Kunduz became one of the wealthiest Afghan provinces. This was mainly due to Nasher's founding of the Spinzar Cotton Company, which continues to exist in post-war Afghanistan. Kunduz is the most important agricultural province which produces wheat, rice, millet, and other products and obtained the nickname of "the hive of the country."
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