The Afridi: Pashtun tribe of the Khyber and Tirah

Who the Afridi are

The Afridi (also written Apridi) are a major Pashtun tribe of north-western Pakistan, with a few members in Afghanistan. Their language is eastern Pashto. [1] Tradition names their ancestor as Faridun, a descendant of Karlan, the forefather of the group of tribes called the Karlanri. [1] Olaf Caroe's book lists the Afridi among the hill tribes of the Karlanri group, alongside the Wazir, Bangash, Orakzai and others. [4] The Encyclopaedia Iranica entry by Charles Kieffer, however, also describes the Afridi as belonging to the "eastern" Pashtuns and as part of the Ghilzai, even as it traces their lineage to Karlan, so even specialist sources do not classify them identically. [1]

Clans and homeland

Six clans are generally called the Khyber clans: the Kuki Khel, Kambar Khel, Kamar Khel, Malik Din Khel, Sepah and Zakka Khel. All are established around the Khyber Pass. Two further clans are described as assimilated and are not recognised by the first six: the Aka Khel, south of the Bara river next to the Orakzai, and the Adam Khel, in the hills between Peshawar and Kohat. Kieffer stresses how complex the tribe is, which he thinks may reflect the varied origins of the groups that make it up. [1]

At the end of the nineteenth century, according to the Dictionary of the Pathan Tribes by J. W. Murray, most Afridi except the Adam Khel were still nomads. In summer they moved to the high country of Tirah, which they had taken early in the nineteenth century from the Dardic-speaking Tirahi, and in winter they lived in the Khyber, Bazar and Kajuri valleys. [1] Landi Kotal, the highest point of the pass, is described as a bazaar centre for the Afridi and the Shinwari, the major tribes of the Khyber area. [2]

Origins: tradition, folklore and evidence

Several theories have been offered about where the Afridi came from. Some scholars have linked their name to the Aparutai, a people Herodotus lists among the inhabitants of the Achaemenid empire's seventh satrapy. Kieffer finds this almost impossible to accept: the Persian inscriptions never mention the Aparutai, nobody knows where they lived, and the sound changes needed to turn Aparutai into Apridi are highly improbable. He also dismisses the Afridi's own belief in a Greek ancestry as a folk tradition found in much of the Dardic and Kafir region, spread by Abu'l-Fazl, Akbar's secretary, and revived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by orientalists enthusiastic for Greece and by politicians looking for Aryan descent. [1]

Kieffer's own suggestion is that the Afridi are in large part of Dardic origin. His main argument is that the location of their settlements seems hardly to have changed over a long period. Bellew reported a tradition that Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni settled them as a military colony in the Khyber region and that Muhammad of Ghor later reinforced them with a fresh population of the same kind. Kieffer says this probably historical tradition does not contradict the Dardic hypothesis and fits what is known of other Pashtun groups, which are ethnically mixed. [1]

Keepers of the Khyber

The Afridi appear in history with Babur, who decided to bring them under his control. [1] Their strategic position is unusual. The Peshawar valley is ringed by mountains pierced by four passes: the road to the Punjab across the plains in the east, the Malakand pass in the north, and in the west the Khyber, which gives access to the Kabul road, and the Kohat pass in the south, which controls the road from Bannu, Waziristan and Baluchistan. The last two are in Afridi hands. Kieffer notes that the Afridi therefore enjoyed the income from tolls, or from banditry as outsiders called it, charged on anyone who wished to pass. [1]

Andreas Wilde's Iranica entry on the Khyber Pass adds that the pass runs 33 miles from Jamrud in the east to Dakka in the west. In its eastern section it is the Afridi who inhabit the pass, with the Shinwari in the western part beyond Landi Kotal and the Orakzai in the neighbouring upland valleys. Rulers in Kabul, Wilde says, often held only nominal control over the pass, because its inhabitants, who acted as its wardens, largely kept their independence. [2]

The Khyber battle of 1672

The best-known episode is the destruction of a Mughal army in 1672. The sources agree on the broad outline: in that year the Afridi wiped out a Mughal force and captured its baggage train, and the pass stayed closed for two years until Emperor Aurangzeb himself put down the rebellion. [2] The poet and Khattak chief Khushal Khan Khattak joined the rebel confederacy of the Afridi and Mohmand tribes, and Aurangzeb stayed at Attock for two years to deal with it. [3]

Caroe gives more detail, drawing on Khushal's poems and Mughal sources, and his account is the one source here that describes the fighting itself. The Mughal governor of Kabul, Amin Khan, set out in the early spring of 1672 to cross the pass. The tribes, including Mohmands, Safis, Afridis and Shinwaris, had organised a confederacy and blocked the road near the top of the pass. An attempt to negotiate failed, and the army was forced to fight. According to Caroe the resistance was organised mainly by two Afridi chiefs, Aimal Khan and Darya Khan, who appear in Khushal's poems as heroes of the Pashtuns of their time. Boulders had been piled up and were rolled down on the troops, and Mughal commanders were killed on both flanks. A proposal to turn the pass by a side route then led, in Caroe's telling, to treachery and the destruction of the army, with the governor and four others the only survivors. The tribesmen later claimed, through Khushal, to have inflicted losses of 40,000. That figure is a tribal claim and should not be taken as exact. [4]

Caroe adds that further disasters followed for Mughal arms in 1673 at Gandab and in 1674 at the Khapakh Pass, both in Mohmand country, and that Aurangzeb went north in person in 1674 to take charge. [4]

Allowances, Sikhs and the British

Persuading the Afridi to keep the pass open was always a matter of payment as much as of force. Ahmad Shah Durrani, according to Kieffer, was able to bring them into his army only nominally. [1] Wilde notes that after the First Anglo-Afghan War control of the pass passed back to the Afghans, and that the rulers of Kabul, as before the war, paid annual allowances to the tribes to keep it open. [2] The Sikh general Hari Singh built the fort of Jamrud at the eastern mouth of the pass in 1836. During the First Anglo-Afghan War the British and Sikhs met heavy resistance in 1839, and continued attacks by the Khyber tribes, particularly the Afridi, made British control of the pass precarious. [2]

Afghan supremacy over the pass ended with the Second Anglo-Afghan War. By the Treaty of Gandomak, signed in May 1879, jurisdiction over the Khyber and Michni passes passed to the British. [2] [5] The British continued paying large sums to local tribes to keep the road open, and the creation of the Durand Line in the 1890s settled the arrangement. [2] Kieffer observes that the Afridi used each of the Anglo-Afghan wars and both world wars to assert their independence, and that the strategic position of the tribe was such that British authorities were generous with subsidies. [1]

Numbers and a caution about dates

Murray estimated that the Afridi numbered 32,900 fighting men at the end of the nineteenth century, and a later estimate by C. C. Davies, in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, put the tribe at about 50,000, which Kieffer thinks reasonable. Unofficial Afghan sources have claimed as many as 60,000 Afridi live inside Afghanistan, but Kieffer, who met many Afridi in Afghanistan as traders, labourers and farmers, believes their numbers there are modest, and that the large figure reflects the Afghan claim to Pashtunistan by counting the whole tribe on both sides of the border. [1] All of these figures are old and should be read as period estimates. The description of the Afridi territory in Pakistan as a free zone for the arms trade in the same entry dates from 1984 and does not describe present conditions. [1]