Although Samarkand was relieved and the Umayyad army escaped annihilation, the battle "was not wholly an Arab victory", according to the historian M. A. Shaban.[1] According to Khalid Yahya Blankinship, it was "a Pyrrhic victory at best",[2] due to the high casualties suffered by the Muslims; indeed, the sources record both Junayd and the Caliph Hisham publicly equating it with the disastrous defeat suffered at the hands of the Khazars in the Battle of Marj Ardabil a year before.[40] The 10th-century historian Ibn A'tham al-Kufi puts the Muslim casualties at at least 20,000 out of a total of 43,000 or 48,000, while poets of the time raise the number to 50,000.