Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 May 1885 — ABDURRAHMAN KHAN. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

ABDURRAHMAN KHAN.

The Ameer of Afghanistan.

Ameer Abdurrahman Khan was bom in 1830. He is the eldest son of Afzul Khan, and is thus a grandson of Dost Mahommed, who ruled Afghanistan till his death in 1863, and nephew to the late Shere Ali, who was deposed and expelled by the British invasion of 1879, and who died soon afterward in exile. When Shere Ali was was recognized by the English, Abdurrahman, who had married a daughter of the Turkish Ameer of Bokhara, took refuge in those countries north of Afghanistan beyond the Oxus, which had then not yet been subjected to Russian control. He was pursued, however, by the persecuting spite of Shere Ali and Yakoub, who had seized his mother, wife, and sister, and detained them many years prisoner at Candahar, and who compelled the Ameer of Bokhara to deny him an abode in that state. Abdurrahman was fain to put himself under the protection of the Russians, then gradually advancing their conquests in Turkestan, and was received by Gen. Kaufmann, who procured him, in his poverty, a Kussian pension of 25,000 rubles a year, and afterward permitted him to reside at Samarcand. After innumerable intrigues and internal dissensions the throne was again vacated, and the present Ameer was chosen in 1880, and has been very substantially supnprted by the British Government of India, under Lord Ripon, receiving from it a regular subsidy of £160,000 a year, with large gifts of artillery, rifles, and ammunition to improve his military force.