The Qajars (also spelled Kadjars, Kajars, Kadzhars, Cadzhars, Cadjars and so on) are a Turkic Oghuz tribe who live variously, with other tribes, in the area that is now Armenia, Azerbaijan and northwestern Iran.
They are considered as a branch of the Azerbaijanis.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Qajars resist the Safavids and settle the Karabakh Khanate.
In 1794, a Kajar chieftain, Agha Mohammed, founds the Qajar dynasty, which replaces the Zand dynasty in Iran.
In the 1980s the Kajar population exceeds fifteen thousand people, most of whom live in Iran.
A branch, attested only as ‘Kadzhar’ (i.e. ‘Qajar’ via Cyrillic transcription), lives in Russian Armenia in the nineteenth century and likely earlier; in 1873 they number five thousand.
