The siege was the final chapter in a dynastic war that had consumed Iran for fifteen years. Lotf Ali Khan, the last ruler of the Zand dynasty, had been fighting a losing struggle against the Qajars since the late 1770s. Charismatic and brave but increasingly desperate, Lotf Ali Khan found himself with fewer allies and fewer cities willing to shelter him. In early 1794, the Afghan chiefs of Bam invited him to return and throw off Qajar control. With their support he marched on Kerman and seized it on March 30, giving the city new walls and new hope. But Agha Mohammad Khan learned of the capture almost immediately. By May 14, Qajar forces were on the march. The siege began, and with it, a slow strangulation of the city's food, water, and morale.

Through the summer of 1794, Kerman held. The defenders knew what surrender might bring -- Agha Mohammad Khan's reputation for ruthlessness preceded him -- and every evening, people gathered on the towers above the city gates to recite mocking poems directed at the Qajar commander. Women joined in the taunting. It was an act of collective defiance that would later be cited as one of the provocations for what followed. Inside the walls, Lotf Ali Khan minted coins in his own name, a declaration of sovereignty that Agha Mohammad Khan took as a personal affront. The Qajar leader had spent years at the court of the previous Zand king, Karim Khan, where he had endured humiliation. Every insult from Kerman's towers fed a grudge that had been building for decades. When the city fell on October 24, Lotf Ali Khan fled southeast to Bam, hoping to regroup once more.

Lotf Ali Khan's escape proved short-lived. The chief of Bam, calculating that loyalty to a doomed king was no longer worth the risk, handed him over to the Qajars. The last Zand ruler was delivered to the man who had waited years for this moment. Historical sources record that Lotf Ali Khan was blinded, then imprisoned and tortured in Tehran for months before being choked to death in late 1794. He was likely in his mid-twenties. With his death, the Zand dynasty ended and the Qajar consolidation of Iran was effectively complete. But the fate of Lotf Ali Khan, terrible as it was, paled beside what Agha Mohammad Khan inflicted on the city that had sheltered him.

Agha Mohammad Khan's vengeance against Kerman was both calculated and personal. He ordered all male inhabitants killed or blinded. The resulting pile of twenty thousand detached eyeballs was, according to multiple contemporary accounts, presented before the Qajar leader as proof that his command had been carried out. Women and children were taken from the city and sold into slavery. Then, over the course of ninety days, the city itself was dismantled -- buildings pulled down, infrastructure destroyed, the physical fabric of a place that had stood for centuries reduced to rubble. The scale of the atrocity shocked even an era accustomed to the violence of dynastic warfare. Kerman did eventually rebuild, but the siege left scars that persisted for generations. The city's population took decades to recover, and the memory of 1794 remains embedded in the local identity of Kerman to this day. For travelers passing over this ancient city, the orderly streets and quiet courtyards below offer few visible traces of the catastrophe. But the story is there, layered beneath the modern surface like the ruins beneath the foundations.