A Punjabi-origin Sikh and Hindu trading community lived in Afghanistan for centuries, at Kabul, Jalalabad, Ghazni and Kandahar, running the money trade, herbal medicine and shops.
Their numbers are usually put at around fifty thousand before the 1990s. After the civil war, the Taliban period, and a series of attacks including the Jalalabad suicide bombing of 2018 and the Kabul gurdwara attack of 2020, the community has almost entirely left.
Fewer than a hundred are generally reported to remain. Most went to India on long-term visas or to Britain and elsewhere as refugees, and a number of Guru Granth Sahib Ji birs were evacuated from Kabul by air in 2021 and 2022.
Their Punjabi is distinct and their surnames and practices carry the marks of a community that lived among Pashtuns for generations.
A community that survived every invasion of Afghanistan for four hundred years ended within thirty.
The community was old, spoke Pashto and Dari, and worked in trade and in traditional medicine. Kabul, Jalalabad, Ghazni and Khost all had gurdwaras.
The numbers fell from tens of thousands in the 1970s to a few dozen. The attacks on the Kabul gurdwara in 2020 and on a Jalalabad gathering in 2018 accounted for the last of it.
India has taken most of those who left and the community is now largely in Delhi, where its Punjabi is different and its customs are its own.