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[Creeperopolis]

The Battle of the Defile or Battle of the Pass (Arabic: وقعة الشعب, romanized: Waqʿat al-Shʿib) was fought in the Takhtakaracha Pass (in modern Uzbekistan) between a large army of the Umayyad Caliphate and the Turkic Türgesh khaganate over three days in July 731 CE. The Türgesh had been besieging Samarkand and Samarkand’s commander, Sawra ibn al-Hurr al-Abani, had sent a request for relief to the newly appointed governor of Khurasan, Junayd ibn Abd al-Rahman al-Murri. Junayd's 28,000-strong army was attacked by the Türgesh in the pass, and although the Umayyad army managed to extricate itself and reach Samarkand, it suffered enormous casualties; Sawra's 12,000 men, who had been commanded to attack the Türgesh from the rear in a relief effort, were almost annihilated.

The battle, for which one of the most detailed accounts of the entire Umayyad era survives in the History of al-Tabari, halted or reversed Muslim expansion into Central Asia for a decade. The losses suffered by the Khurasani army also led to the transfer of reinforcements from the metropolitan regions of the Caliphate, which in the long term weakened the Umayyad regime and helped bring about its collapse twenty years later in the Abbasid Revolution that began in Khurasan.