Short answers, pulled from the story.
Herat is a city in western Afghanistan, serving as the capital and largest city of Herat Province. It sits north of the Hari River and south of the Paropamisus Mountains, in the fertile valley of the Hari River.
Herat earned the title Pearl of Khorasan during the Middle Ages as one of the important cities of the region. The 14th-century geographer Hamdallah Mustawfi compared Khurasan to a pearl-oyster and Herat to the pearl in its middle.
The Mongol Empire besieged Herat twice. The first siege killed the local sultan's army of 12,000, and the second, ending in June 1222, reportedly led to the beheading of the entire population of 1,600,000. The city lay in ruins from 1222 to about 1236.
Under the Timurids, beginning with Shahrokh as governor in 1397, Herat became the focal point of a cultural rebirth whose glory is thought to have matched Florence of the Italian Renaissance. The city was famous for court life, miniature paintings, and buildings like the Musallah Complex and the madrasa of Gawhar Shad.
The Taliban first captured Herat on the 5th of September 1995, making it the first Persian-speaking city they took. The city was retaken by Northern Alliance forces on the 12th of November 2001, then fell to the Taliban again on the 12th of August 2021.
Herat has an estimated population of 673,273 settled residents, and has long been the third-largest city of Afghanistan. Most residents speak Dari, one of Afghanistan's two official languages, and the city is multi-ethnic with Tajiks forming the majority.
Herat is a major industrial and trading center that serves as the gateway to Iran and Turkmenistan, collecting billions of dollars in customs revenue for Afghanistan. Its economy is based on agriculture, trade, transport, and tourism, and the province is famous for grapes and saffron.