As Nader moved into the Mughal territories, he was accompanied by his Georgian subject and future king of eastern Georgia, Erekle II, who led a Georgian contingent in the Imperial Persian army. Hearing of Nader Shah's approach from Qandahar, the governor of Peshawar & Kabul raised an army of 20,000 men, mostly made up of Afghan mercenaries drawn from the tribes of Eastern Afghanistan in order to check the Persian advance. The position that had been chosen to resist the Persian army could scarcely have been better selected, as through the narrow Khyber pass only a small column of men could hope to march and any deployment into fighting formations would be an impossibility. Nader, convinced of the futility of a head-on struggle, instead opted for an alternative approach. A local guide informed him of a difficult yet traversable pass running parallel to that of Kheibar called the pass of Chatchoobi.