Battle of Ahmed Khel
1880 battle of the Second Anglo-Afghan War
The Battle of Ahmed Khel took place during the Second Anglo-Afghan War. It was fought on 19 April 1880, on the road between Kandahar and Kabul in central Afghanistan between Afghan tribesmen and soldiers of the British Empire, including forces from both British and Indian armies.
On 27 March 1880, Lieutenant General Donald Stewart, with a force of 7,200, left Kandahar in south Afghanistan to march to Kabul, in order to reinforce General Roberts, the British commander in the Afghan capital. During the journey, the country was largely deserted, creating difficulties in supplying the troops, while the column was shadowed by a large force of Afghan tribesmen.
On 19 April 1880, the column was near the village of Ahmed Khel, about 23 miles (37 km) from Ghazni. Here, at a point where the road narrowed, a force of about 12,000 to 15,000 Afghan tribesmen was in place along the hills, threatening the column's flank. As Stewart began to reposition his men to respond, the mass of Afghan tribesmen rushed over the hills and attacked. While the British-led force had difficulty in holding their line, the Afghans were eventually driven back and, after an hour of fierce fighting, the tribesmen fled. The Afghans suffered heavy casualties – 2,000 to 3,000 killed – compared with British and Indian loses of 17 dead and 124 wounded.
Following the battle, Stewart continued to advance and occupied Ghazni the next day, before marching on to Kabul without further substantial resistance.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Battle of Ahmed Khel” as 1880 battle of the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4870232. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1880.
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This entry incorporates text from “Battle of Ahmed Khel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.