On October 7th, 2001, barely a month after a terrorist attack on the United States on September 11th, 2001, a coalition of military forces led by and consisting substantially of American military forces, invaded the country of Afghanistan in an effort to dismantle the Muslim political group known as the Taliban, Which had ruled Afghanistan since coming to power in in 1996, after the withdrawal of Russian forces (again, for the third time in little more than a century) from that country following the 10 year Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989). 

 

  During the 20 years that American forces tried their hand at occupying Afghanistan, a large trove of 19th century rifles made their way to the US via American service members. Virtually all of these rifles arrived on American shores in substantially similar condition, to the point that it became easy for collectors to recognize previous Afghanistan utilized 19th century weapons. Such rifles had at one time been completely, very darkly patinaed, but for whatever reason Kabul merchants decided that American GIs wanted arms that were bright and shiny, and so they spared no effort with sandpaper and wire wheels to make them shiny everywhere except the hard-to-reach places and parts. Additionally, wood was virtually never in particularly good condition and most such rifles had small missing parts such as screws, sling swivels and missing or mismatched cleaning rods. We here discuss this because most experienced collectors of 19th century rifles simply recognize Afghan origin rifles virtually immediately, the importance of which becomes obvious in the next section. 

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  It should be noted clearly here at the outset that our identification of the rifles highlighted in this page are speculative, and may not align completely with the research and suggestions of Jonathan Kirton, who is in all likelihood the premier Anglosphere expert on Comblains. Even in the 21st century, much historical research leaves considerable room for varying interpretations. We invite anyone who can shed light on these Comblain models to please chime in.

  That being said, we have personally, physically inspected, or closely reviewed sets of photographs, of five different M1881 Comblains. All are identical but for serial numbers and patent royalty numbers and all have been manufactured by Auguste Francotte, Liege, gun makers. All five came to the US via American service members serving in Afghanistan, and all these rifles having previously led an obviously long life in Afghanistan. None of these are one-offs, they are all part of a specific contract/series of rifles. There must be a good reason why multiple examples have been found in Afghanistan.

 

  M1881 Comblain rifles have been identified as part of the estimated 1,000 or so Persian contract of 1882 rifles, described by Jonathan Kirton (Gun Report Vol 50, Number 5, Oct 2004, at page 17).  All of the rifles pictured here are rather rough, which is not surprising considering that they are Afghan war bring-backs by US service members.