Junaid Khan

Junaid Khan, born Muhammad Kurban, was born in 1857 (1862 according to other accounts) near Takhta, then part of the Khanate of Khiva. Turkmen sources name the village of Bedirkent as his birthplace, in what is now Görogly District of Daşoguz Region in Turkmenistan. He belonged to the Junaid branch of the Turkmen Yomut tribe, which later gave him the name by which he is known. His father, Khojibay, was a respected and wealthy man among the Yomuts. Russian-language sources describe Muhammad Kurban as illiterate, yet he had standing in his village, serving first as its qadi (judge) and then as mirab, the official in charge of sharing out irrigation water.

In the early 20th century disputes between the Yomuts and the Khan of Khiva, Isfandiyar, over land, water and taxes grew sharper. When the khan sent a punitive expedition against the Turkmens of the Takhta area in 1912–1913, Muhammad Kurban became one of the leaders of the resistance and came to be called serdar (chief). Russian-language sources add that his men retaliated by raiding Uzbek villages in the Tashauz and Ilyali districts. In early 1916 his horsemen occupied Khiva and left only after extracting a large payment from the khan. A Russian punitive force under General Galkin was sent from Tashkent to support the khan; defeated near Gazavat in March, Junaid Khan withdrew into the Karakum Desert and then to Iran and Afghanistan.

After the February Revolution of 1917 the Young Khivans made the khan issue a manifesto promising reforms, but their government was soon overthrown. Returning to Khorezm that year, Junaid Khan reconciled Turkmen tribes that had long been at odds and built close ties with Colonel Ivan Zaitsev, commander of the detachment sent to Khiva by the Russian Provisional Government. In January 1918 Isfandiyar appointed him commander-in-chief of the khanate's forces, with the title serdar-karim. Once Zaitsev's detachment had left Khiva, Junaid Khan's roughly 1,600 horsemen became the khanate's main armed force. In 1918 (in October, according to most sources) Isfandiyar Khan was killed in the Nurullabay Palace on Junaid Khan's orders. The murdered khan's brother, Sayid Abdullah, was placed on the throne, while real power passed to Junaid Khan. That same year he defeated and drove out his rivals in the khanate, among them the Turkmen chiefs Koshmamed Khan and Gulam Ali.

With Khiva in his hands, Junaid Khan went to war with the Turkestan Soviet Republic. In November 1918 his army besieged Petro-Aleksandrovsk (now Turtkul), the Soviet centre on the Amu Darya, but failed to take it and fell back. In April 1919, at the fortress of Takhta, he signed a peace treaty with representatives of Turkestan under which it recognised the independence of Khiva. Fighting soon resumed. At the end of 1919 the Red Army, together with the Young Khivans and Turkmen chiefs hostile to Junaid Khan, entered the khanate. Defeated in January 1920, he retreated into the Karakum; in early February Sayid Abdullah abdicated, and in April the Khorezm People's Soviet Republic was proclaimed in place of the khanate.

Junaid Khan kept up his armed struggle. In early 1922 he made contact with Enver Pasha and the kurbashis of the Fergana Valley and in April took the fortress of Porsu, but in May part of his force surrendered to Soviet troops and he left for Iran. In January 1924 his detachments seized Tashauz, Mangit, Shavat, Gazavat and Khanka and laid siege to Khiva; when Soviet reinforcements arrived, he withdrew again. In 1925 the First Congress of Soviets of the Turkmen SSR, at the insistence of the head of government Kaigisiz Atabayev, pardoned him and allowed him to live in his home village. In September 1927, however, he led a new uprising in the Tashauz district and was declared an outlaw. After his defeat he went abroad once more and spent the rest of his life in Iran and Afghanistan, mostly around Herat; until the early 1930s his followers raided Soviet Turkmenistan from there.

Junaid Khan died in 1938 in Herat Province, Afghanistan. Assessments of him differ. Soviet historiography portrayed him as one of the chief leaders of the Basmachi and an enemy of Soviet power. The National Encyclopedia of Uzbekistan, published after independence, counts him among the figures of the independence movement against the Russian Empire and Soviet rule, while Turkmen authors stress his efforts to unite the Turkmen tribes. Historians also note that Uzbeks and leaders of some Turkmen tribes who resented his rule turned to the Bolsheviks for help.