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Bagram (; Pashto/) is a town and seat in Bagram District in Parwan Province of Afghanistan, about 60 kilometers north of the capital Kabul. It is the site of an ancient city located at the junction of the Ghorband Valley and Panjshir Valley, near today's city of Charikar, Afghanistan. The location of this historical town made it a key passage from Ancient India along the Silk Routes, leading westwards through the mountains towards Bamyan City, and north over the Kushan Pass to the Baghlan ValleyCunningham (1871), pp. 16-27 and past the Kushan archeological site at Surkh Kotal, to the commercial centre of Balkh and the rest of northern Afghanistan. Bagram was the capital of the Kushan Empire in the first century Common Era.
While the Diadochi were warring amongst themselves, the Mauryan dynasty was developing in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent. The founder of the empire, Chandragupta Maurya, confronted a Macedonian invasion force led by Seleucus I in 305 BC and following a brief conflict, an agreement was reached as Seleucus ceded Gandhara and Arachosia (centered on ancient Kandahar) and areas south of Bagram (corresponding to the extreme south-east of modern Afghanistan) to the Mauryans. During the 120 years of the Mauryans in southern Afghanistan, Buddhism was introduced and eventually become a major religion alongside Zoroastrianism and local pagan beliefs. Mauryan punch-marked coins have been discovered at Begram and Mir Zakah, indicating early trade or administrative presence in the region.
Bagram became the capital of the Kushan Empire in the first century. The "Bagram treasure" as it has been called, is indicative of intense commercial exchanges between all the cultural centers of the classical time, with the Kushan empire at the junction of the land and sea trade between the east and west. However, the works of art found in Bagram, such as the Begram ivories, are either quite purely Hellenistic, Roman, Chinese or Indian, with only little indications of the cultural syncretism found in Greco-Buddhist art.
Bagram is also the location of the Parwan Detention Facility; this detention facility was the last prison in Afghanistan under management of the US. It was handed back to the Afghan government on 25 March 2013.Aljazeera news: US hands over Bagram prison to Afghanistan, 25 March 2013 The detention centre had earlier come into the attention of the news media as it was claimed that prisoners were tortured (see the article Bagram torture and prisoner abuse). At the time of the hand-over of the facility, human-rights groups like Amnesty International have raised concerns about the treatment of prisoners there.
On December 21, 2015, Bagram was the site of a suicide bombing killing 6 people.
On July 1, 2021, US troops departed from the air base, abandoning the outpost over to the Afghan government after 20 years. According to the Afghan commander at the time, the US evacuated the base during the night without any previous official notice to the Afghan army.
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