Ushra'Khan: EVE's Oldest Alliance

Ushra'Khan: EVE's Oldest Alliance

Before the alliance: the gathering of the tribes

The Ushra'Khan did not begin as an alliance. It began as a scattering of small Minmatar corporations in the earliest months of EVE Online, when CONCORD-recognised alliances did not yet exist and a single battleship skirmish was worth writing a forum post about. In 2003 and early 2004, corps like SMaK Enterprises, Oracle, The People's Front of Minmatar, Freelance Unincorporated and Matari BackBone were already at war with the Amarr-loyalist corps that would later become the Curatores Veritatis Alliance, the Praetoria Imperialis Excubitoris and Imperial Dreams among them. The fighting was in empire space, especially Molden Heath, and the great trade hub of the day was Yulai rather than Jita.

What pulled the Minmatar corps together was politics and grievance. After the Khumaak controversy in early 2004, the Matari community organised itself into the People's Republic of Minmatar with a council and a strategic pact called the Friends of Matar. Skirmishes with CVA's precursors sharpened the sense that these corporations needed to be one thing, not many. By the mid-2004 Jovian artefacts event the ties were strong enough that two of the founding corps returned from the Curse region to join the war effort. The pieces were in place; all that was missing was the technology to make it official.

The founding, 25 November 2004

At 16:44 EVE time on 25 November 2004, the corporation Amarr Will Eat Itself founded the Ushra'Khan. The timing was almost a stunt: the alliance came into being at the first possible moment the mechanic allowed it, the gathering of two informal Minmatar pacts into a single CONCORD-recognised alliance in orbit over their home planet of Matar, in the Pator system. It is the oldest alliance still flying in EVE Online, and that founding minute would be celebrated to the exact hour on its birthdays for the next two decades.

The alliance's purpose never wavered from the day it was formed. Ugleb, its long-time executor, would later put it in a single sentence:

We are a movement founded with one goal; to break the chains of slavery that bind our kin.

Everything else followed from that. The Ushra'Khan were not a sovereignty empire, not a coalition power, not a money-making machine. They were freedom fighters with one enemy and one war, and they would spend the next twenty-two years fighting it.

"We come for our people": the slaver-rebel identity and the CVA feud

The Ushra'Khan describe themselves as New Eden's freedom fighters, and they flew under a mantra that doubled as a threat: "we are the Ushra'Khan, we come for our people." That self-image was built entirely in opposition to the Amarr Empire and its loyalist players, who in the role-play fiction kept Minmatar slaves. Five days after the Ushra'Khan formed, their mirror image came into being. The Curatores Veritatis Alliance, founded on 30 November 2004 out of the same pool of Amarr-loyalist corps the Minmatar had been fighting for a year, dedicated itself to extending the Holy Amarr Empire into lawless space under a Not Red Don't Shoot doctrine.

Two alliances, founded within a week of each other, with opposite causes and a shared certainty that the other was evil. The feud that followed became the longest continuous role-play war in EVE Online, and it ran on a strange mixture of total hostility and genuine respect. The two sides fought without quarter and abused each other on the EVE forums, but they also kept a gentleman's understanding to avoid the spies and alt-infiltration that poisoned most EVE wars, and they meant the respect they paid one another. Each was the other's defining enemy for twenty years, and each would in time admit that the war was what made them who they were.

The Ushra'Khan's notoriety spread beyond the war itself. The alliance became known across New Eden for its prolific GalNet commentary, driven by characters like General Windypops and Butter Dog, and for a free-fire policy in Providence and Catch that critics called terrorism. An Amarr loyalist of CVA, Alistair Cononach, wished aloud that the rebels' dedication "could be used for righteousness, holiness, and following God's Will, instead of the murder of innocent pilots." Ugleb answered, as he always did, by pointing at the slavers: the free-fire warzone existed because of the level of slaver activity in the regions, and it would exist for as long as the slavers did.

Early wars: a trophy and the road to Providence

The first years were fought from the alliance's home in the Pator system, in the Minmatar Republic. The early wars were small by later EVE standards but enormous to the people fighting them. In February 2005 the Ushra'Khan scored a propaganda coup that delighted the whole Minmatar community: one of their pilots, Icarus Starkiller, won a famous Imperial Issue Armageddon, an Amarr Navy battleship, in the BIG lottery. A large Ushra'Khan escort fleet ran the trophy from Amarr space all the way home to Pator, and the rebels made no secret of their plan to turn an Amarr warship against the empire that built it.

It was in 2006 that the Ushra'Khan made the move that would define them: they left their nomadic life behind and built a permanent outpost, Unity Station, in 9UY4-H in the Providence region, planting a Minmatar fortress on the doorstep of CVA's holy crusade. The seventeen-year war over that single station, its first fall to CVA, its recapture, its conversion into a permanent in-game monument, and its final destruction, is a saga in its own right and is recorded in this archive's Unity Station entry.

The faction-warfare turn and the Alliance Tournament

By 2008 the Ushra'Khan had grown into a fixture of the wider game, respected as a veteran anti-slavery alliance and confident enough to enter the Alliance Tournament. They competed in the fifth tournament as a faction-free team, refusing even to represent the Minmatar Republic and instead dedicating their fights to the Defiants and the freedom of their people. Their executor, Karn Mithralia, talked up their chances in the run-up, reminding everyone that the alliance had made a solid name for itself in earlier tournaments and was a match for the veteran mercenaries of KIA Alliance they were drawn against in the closing match of the first day.

They lost. Eliminated from the tournament by the alliance eXceed., the Ushra'Khan tournament team went down in front of the millions of capsuleers watching, and the Minmatar Republic, which had invested heavily in the only team openly flying their colours, took it hard. The fiction reported riots breaking out across several cities on the planet Pator, with thousands of fights, full-blown riots in five locations, over a thousand injured and seven dead, all because a beloved team had lost a sporting event. It was a measure of what the Ushra'Khan meant to the people they claimed to fight for.

Two months later the alliance announced its boldest campaign yet, a march on Amarr itself. Karn declared that the alliance's warriors were "bound for Amarr itself" and named specific Amarr-loyalist alliances and corporations as targets, while Ugleb framed it as a fresh front: attacking the supporters of the empire where they lived, disrupting their mission hubs and supply lines, and targeting slave transports to recover Minmatar captives. The campaign drew the predictable accusations of piracy from non-combatants, and the predictable defiance from the rebels.

First near-death: the Tarac Nor betrayal, 2010

The Ushra'Khan's greatest victory and its first near-death came within months of each other. In February 2010 the alliance reclaimed Unity Station after a three-year exile. Five months later it almost ceased to exist.

On 24 July 2010 the Ushra'Khan suddenly lost sovereignty over three systems when fifteen of their seventeen corporations were unexpectedly ejected from the alliance, leaving only Unity Holdings and the executor corporation under hostile control. The man responsible was Tarac Nor, a member who had been in the alliance for a year and had only recently earned the role of Head Diplomat, the access he needed to gut it from the inside. Ugleb's verdict was bleak: "As of now, the Ushra'Khan are under hostile control and considered lost." Tarac, he believed, had done it for a paymaster: the rival group Hydra Reloaded, which wanted Providence restored to CVA because a Not Red Don't Shoot Providence made a rich hunting preserve for pirates.

Tarac Nor was unrepentant. Speaking to the Interstellar Correspondents the same day, he admitted the motive was partly money and partly boredom:

The ISK was a big motivation, but I can't say it was the only motive... I was getting bored with the alliance.

He confirmed weeks later, on 8 August 2010, that Hydra Reloaded had paid him five billion ISK, and he openly joined them. By then it no longer mattered. The expelled corporations had simply walked out with their assets, their wallets and their pilots intact and regrouped, first under the wing of the alliance Circle-Of-Two and then under a new banner of their own. As the fleet commander Rye Contini shrugged it off: "We've still got all our stuff, the wallet is fine, the pilots are happy, we just need to retake our system." The diplomat Emrys Ap'Morgravaine renamed the regrouped alliance Damu'Khonde and counted what the spy had failed to take:

We are to a degree remarkably lucky. We haven't lost our sovreignty, we haven't lost our station.

Damu'Khonde was only ever a temporary name. The alliance later reclaimed the Ushra'Khan name and ticker outright, and it is that continuity, an unbroken founding date of 25 November 2004 on the original alliance record, that lets the Ushra'Khan still call themselves the oldest alliance in EVE. The spy took the name for a few weeks. He never took the alliance.

Second near-death: the 2012 collapse and the faction-warfare pivot

The closer call came two years later, and it came from within rather than from a saboteur. By 2012 the Ushra'Khan were a role-play alliance increasingly adrift in a null-sec landscape that had moved on without them, dominated by enormous coalitions playing a realpolitik game the rebels had never been interested in. The alliance CEO, Tempest, announced that the Ushra'Khan would disband. As the long-time member Strepan recorded it, this could easily have been the end: an alliance lost without purpose in the new and ever-changing null-sec politics.

What saved the Ushra'Khan was a change of battlefield. Factional Warfare became the alliance's new home and its new purpose, restoring exactly the thing the alliance had been built for: an open, permanent war against Amarr loyalists, fought in the low-security warzone instead of the null-sec sovereignty map. The enemy was the same, the cause was the same, and the alliance survived by going back to first principles. It would spend the next decade as a faction-warfare power, and never again came as close to dying.

Holding the line: the faction-warzone decade

From 2013 onward the Ushra'Khan fought in the Minmatar faction warzone, in the Bleak Lands, Devoid and Metropolis, against Amarr-loyalist outfits and the mercenary gentlemen of fortune who came hunting in the same space. What mattered to them was not territory but the fight, and the principle that you undock for your people whether or not the odds are with you.

That decade produced the kind of set pieces the alliance had always specialised in. In late 2019, with the warzone in crisis and other Matari groups demanding the Ushra'Khan defend the contested system of Floseswin, the alliance launched a pair of operations to blockade Floseswin IV from orbit and to threaten the Amarr in neighbouring systems. Harkon Thorson's declaration was pure Ushra'Khan: bitter at the years when no one had cared about thier fight, scornful of the new fair-weather allies, and absolutely committed to the war regardless. The alliance held its honour-bound word not to retake the system outright while still doing everything short of it to protect the people in it.

The cause held its grip on the alliance's identity right up to the present. In November 2022, ahead of the Uprising expansion that overhauled faction warfare, the Ushra'Khan diplomat Xaar announced a full standings reset to sharpen the alliance's offensive footing in the warzone, describing the Ushra'Khan as "the sword and the shield of the Matari people" and "an independent brotherhood sailing its own path." Twenty years in, the rebels were still picking fights with slavers.

Twenty years and still flying

The Ushra'Khan marked its fifth year in 2009 with a CCP profile celebrating an alliance "denounced as terrorists by those supporting the Empire" and respected as freedom fighters by everyone else. It marked its fifteenth in 2019 with a firsthand history from Strepan and a confession that the alliance had almost died several times. And it marked its twentieth in November 2024 with Pol Macsliebh thanking CVA, "second oldest Alliance in New Eden," for two decades of fights and role-play banter, and promising another twenty years of the same.

The "oldest alliance" claim is not folklore. It is on the record from CCP itself. On the fifteenth-birthday thread, a CCP staffer correcting his own earlier mistake at a community event posted plainly: "I just realised I was mistaken at EVE London when I suggested on stage that CVA was founded 3 days before Ushra'Khan. Ushra'Khan is 5 days older than CVA." Five days, founded at the first instant the game allowed it, never disbanded in the records, in continuous existence since November 2004.

In 2026 the Ushra'Khan are still flying. They hold no sovereignty and want none; they are a faction-warfare alliance of a few hundred pilots staging out of Auga in the Minmatar warzone, fronted by the corporation T.R.I.A.D, whose own lineage runs back to one of the 2003 founding corps, under the long-time diplomat Xaar. The dream is exactly what it was at 16:44 on 25 November 2004. Strepan put the whole twenty-two-year arc into one line on the fifteenth birthday, and it is as good a summary of the alliance as anyone has written:

Sometimes winning just means surviving while keeping your principles intact despite the new dominant realpolitik, fighting your own fight.

The physical proof of all of it still stands in 9UY4-H, where CCP built a permanent monument over the grave of the alliance's first home and gave it the Ushra'Khan crest.