Khan Abdurrashid Khan is the current leader of the Kirghiz nomadic tribes in Little Pamir, Afghanistan. When the Communists took control of Afghanistan in the end of 1970s, the Afghan Kirghiz felt insecure. The khan (the leader) of that time, Rahman Qul Khan, decided to take all the Kirghiz nomads of Little Pamir to an arduous journey down the mountains to Pakistan. They reached Hunza Valley in Northern Pakistan, where Rahman Qul applied for 5.000 asylum visas for the Kirghiz to be migrated to the USA. The nomads were waiting for years, but the heat and bad sanitary condition in Pakistan had killed many of these highlanders. Abdurrashid Khan then decided to lead some of the people who were willing to return, in a journey back to their original homeland in Afghanistan. Majority of the people in Little Pamir now were those returnees and their descendants. Later, they chose Abdurrashid Khan as the new khan to replace Rahman Qul–who had migrated to Turkey in 1981 with all his followers.
Pamir, Wakhan Corridor, Afghanistan, 2008