Persia in the United States of Ameriwank
Before 1777
1777 to 1835
The Safavid Dynasty was ruling in name only by the birth of Ishaq Mirza in 1777. His grandfather Ismail III held the de jure role while Karim Khan actually ruled the empire, deposing Ismail in 1779 and bringing Persia under the Zand dynasty. In the wake of deposition Ishaq's father was executed and Ishaq's life was in danger as well but was luckily taken out of the country to the court of the Mughal Emperor in Delhi. While Ishaq grew up in India Persia continued, Karim Khan took the throne and brough Basra and Azerbaijan into the Persian Empire at the expense of the Ottomans. However the Zand entered into a period of decline after Karim Khan's death and the rival Qajar Dynasty took power in 1785.
Agha Mohammed Khan Qajar led a bloody campaign at the expense of the Zand Dynasty to reunify Persia and was crowned Shah in 1796. The successor to the Shah, Fat'h Ali Shah took over Persia but led it into a disastrous war against Russia that saw much of the Caucasus Mountains annexed to the Russian Empire at the expense of Persia. This loss would create the internal fractures that led to the Persian Civil War in 1813.
In 1801 Ishaq assisted in a civil war in Durrani Afghanistan which saw Mahmud Shah crowned in Kandahar and gained Ishaq great allies amongst the Afghan tribes.
In 1813 Ishaq gathered forces at Herat and invaded Persia with the intention of taking the Persian throne which he achieved in 1815 with his coronation as Shah Ishaq I in Isafhan. However Persia was not entirely united, the heir to the Qajari Shah was crowned as Hassan I of Azerbaijan.
In 1828 Ishaq brought Persia into the War of the Afghan Succession in favor of his longtime ally Mohammed Hamid Khan of Herat after the Durrani Emir Dost Mohammed Khan died leaving a succession crisis that, coupled with the Bharati distractions to the south, saw Jit Singh of Jammu invade Aghanistan, take Kabul, and intend to capture Kandahar. This war also coincided with a succession crisis amongst the Baloch peoples who placed themselves in personal union with Ishaq and the Safavid dynasty after a brief war. By 1829 the Durrani partition was complete with a Persian controlled Balochistan, Persian dominated state centered on Herat but led by Khan, an independent Pashtunstan, and Jammu control of Kabul and the former northern lands of the Durrani.
In 1833 Ishaq organized an alliance with the Saudi Nejd state to dismember the Sultanate of Oman and regain control of the Persian Gulf. The biref war saw the Sultan of Oman relocate to their Omani African colonies centered on Zanzibar while Persia took control of the Gulf islands and Muscat and the Nejd took control of mainland Oman. Shrewdly this positioned Persia and the Nejd to be rivals in the Persian Gulf which was exactly what Ishaq desired. In 1835 Ishaq approached Suleiman III of the Ottoman Empire with a secret alliance against the Whabbist Nejd, an alliance Suleiman was more than willing to accept.