Bannu: the valley between the Kurram and the Tochi

At a glance

• Bannu is a river-fed basin in southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, shut in by hills on every side. The Kurram and the Tochi (Gambila) run through it and meet near Lakki; the hills to the west are Waziristan. [3, 6]

• The irrigated heart between the two rivers belongs to the Bannuchi, the sandy south to the Marwat, and the northern edge to Wazir and Khattak clans. [3, 5, 6]

• Edwardes laid the foundation of the fort of Dalipgarh on 18 December 1847, and in the weeks that followed the Bannuchis pulled down about 400 village forts at his order. [4, 5]

• The town grew beside the fort as the bazaar Dalipnagar and was renamed Edwardesabad after Edwardes died; Bannu is the name in use. [5, 6]

• The 2023 census counted 1,357,890 people in the district, and 1,342,395 of them gave Pashto as their mother tongue. [8]

• In 2014 Bannu took in more than a million people displaced from North Waziristan, and since 2022 it has seen attacks and large peace rallies. [2, 9, 12, 14, 16]

Where it is

Bannu district lies between Kohat to the north and Dera Ismail Khan to the south, with Waziristan on its western side. The Imperial Gazetteer of 1908 describes a circular basin of 1,670 square miles drained by the Kurram and the Gambila, or Tochi, which "unite at Lakki and flow into the Indus south of Kalabagh". The hills around it are low: the highest point of the Maidani range is 4,256 feet, and Sheikh Budin at the south-west end of the Marwat range is 4,516. [6]

Thorburn, who settled the district in the 1870s, says the Kurram rises in the Spin Ghar near Ghazni, enters at the north-western corner, waters the Bannuchi country and leaves through the narrow gap at Tang Darra. [3] Its silt and canals keep the middle of the valley green while the sandy country around depends on rain. [6] Until 1901 the district also reached across the Indus to Mianwali. [5, 6] For the country around, see the Pashtun lands.

The name and the founder

Bannu is a woman's name in the tradition the Bannuchis tell of themselves, which Thorburn wrote down. A holy man, Pir Shekh Muhammad, sent for the sons of Shah Farid, also called Shitak, from the hill of Shawal, because the Mangals and Hanis then living in the valley had withheld their tithes. The newcomers sent them three pigeons, one whole, one plucked of its wing feathers and one beheaded, as a warning, and the older inhabitants left. The land was marsh and was called Daud; the sons of Shitak drained and sowed it and named it after their mother, the wife of Shitak, "for it is fruitful, even as she was". [3] The Gazetteer of 1883 says each Bannuchi clan still kept its table of descent from Shitak. [5]

The Bannuchis call themselves Bannuwals, Edwardes says. [4] The town has a separate history. Edwardes chose a site from which a fort could command the heads of as many canals as possible, and the first fort, begun on 18 December 1847, was named Dalipgarh for the boy Maharaja Dalip Singh of Lahore, in whose name he was acting. [4, 5] The bazaar beside it was Dalipnagar. [5, 6] The 1883 Gazetteer says that name was never popular, that the place was known simply as Bannu, and that the government gave the town and cantonment the name Edwardesabad only after Sir Herbert Edwardes died; it dates the town to 1848. [5] The Imperial Gazetteer of 1908 also says 1848, and adds that Hindu traders moved there from Bazar Ahmad Khan, the old commercial centre. [6]

Before the Bannuchis

Older settlements lie under the plain. The Imperial Gazetteer reports mounds with burnt brick, broken images and coins with Greek or Greek-looking inscriptions, and says that the Akra mound near Bannu, which rises no more than 70 feet, yielded coins and terracotta figures of the first century BC onward, to the time of the Muslim conquests. [6] Edwardes called it the site of an old Greek city. [4] Local tradition, the Gazetteer adds, blames Mahmud of Ghazni for destroying the Hindu strongholds, and the valley was resettled from the western hills only after more than a century. [6]

Four waves of settlers

The Gazetteer of 1883 sets out the order in which the present peoples came. [5]

First came the Bannuchis, who "about five hundred years ago" displaced the Mangals and Hanis and a small settlement of Khattaks on the marshy banks of the Kurram. Sayyids and learned men followed, and were given land. The Gazetteer says the Bannuchis divided the valley with the help of a Sayyid, Shekh Shah Muhammad Ruhani, whose descendants own the Sadat Tappa, and that they became mixed over the generations, so that in the broad sense "Bannuchi" now covers every Muslim of the irrigated tracts. In the strict sense it means those claiming descent from Shitak. [5]

Babur's note of 1505 is the first outside mention the Gazetteer finds: "the Bangash river runs through the Bannu territory, and by means of it chiefly is the country cultivated". He listed the Afghan tribes who ploughed there as Kerani, Kivi, Sur, Isakhel and Niazai. [5, 6] The river he calls Bangash is the Kurram, which runs upstream through the country of the Bangash.

Second came the Niazi, Lodi Pashtuns who moved from Tank towards the close of the fifteenth century onto the plain now called Marwat. Third came the Marwats, a younger Lohani branch, who drove the Niazis east across the Kurram at Tang Darra, within about fifty years by the Gazetteer's count, and settled the plain as graziers and then as farmers. The Imperial Gazetteer places the Marwats' arrival in the reign of Akbar. [5, 6] Marwat villages kept an unusual custom of periodically redistributing holdings among the shareholders, the khulla wesh or "mouth division", which the 1908 Gazetteer says the last revenue settlement had officially recognised. [6]

Last came the Darwesh Khel Wazirs, whose camps, until about a century before the Gazetteer was written, only came down to the plain occasionally in the cold season. Between 1750 and 1775 the Jani Khel and Bakka Khel seized the Miri grazing lands between the Tochi and the hills, and after 1793 they pressed on the Bannuchis, Khattaks and Marwats alike. [5] Edwardes found them in possession of about a third of the valley and made them pay revenue like their neighbours. He told their chief, Swahn Khan, that no Wazir would stay in Bannu who did not. [4] The Bhittani of the southern hills came later still. [5] The Daur hold the Tochi valley to the west, and for the Mahsud leader of the next century see Mullah Powindah.

Four hundred forts

Bannu was the valley the Sikhs could never hold. Nadir Shah's army, the Gazetteer says, entered by Dawar in 1738 and laid it waste, and Ahmad Shah's lieutenants collected tribute by sending troops to extort it. [5, 6] (On the Durrani state, see Ahmad Shah and the Durrani state.) From 1823 to 1845 a large Sikh army entered the valley every second or third year. The Gazetteer says the Bannuchis suspended their own feuds each time and fought from behind mud walls; Malik Dilasa Khan of the Daud Shah tappa repulsed a siege of several days and cost the Sikhs over two hundred men. [5]

The villages were the defence. In 1837 a Persian traveller in the service of Major Leech reported "full four hundred, if not five hundred, forts and villages in the district", and Edwardes says a fort and a village meant the same thing there. He found Bannu "proverbial, even among the quarrelsome tribes of the Trans-Indus, for its family dissensions", split into two factions, with the Bannuchis "literally never at peace unless they were at war". [4]

Edwardes and the fall of the walls, 1847 to 1849

After the first Sikh war the Lahore Council of Regency, under the British Resident, sent a Sikh army to collect Bannu's "outstanding revenue", with Edwardes as political officer. He came first in the spring of 1847 and returned in the cold weather of 1847 to 1848. [5] He meant to build a fort the army could shelter in before asking the Bannuchis to destroy theirs. [4] The foundation was laid on 18 December 1847, and in the first weeks about four thousand men were at work. [4] His proclamation, issued while the walls were rising, told "the Bunnoochees and Vizeerees" that the new fort made it "no longer necessary that every village should be a fort", and ordered the walls of every fort and enclosed village thrown down within fifteen days. [4] The Gazetteer says he twice narrowly escaped an assassin's dagger and that the priesthood privately approved attacks on sentries. [5]

The walls came down. Edwardes gave the people twenty days in the end, and he later called it "the bloodless conquest of the wild valley of Bunnoo", won "neither by shot nor shell". [4] Thorburn, who admired him, repeats the 400 forts and the bloodless result. [3] The Gazetteer of 1883 draws a different conclusion, in the voice of an administrator: the Bannuchis "thus rivetted their own chains", and, in the Gazetteer's phrase, felt that their days of freedom were numbered. [5] Both writers are British officials. The plain result is that in a few weeks a people who had resisted Sikh armies for over twenty years pulled down their own village walls, and the valley was assessed for revenue.

The peace did not hold at once. When the rising at Multan came, Edwardes marched with levies from Bannu and the Sikh garrison of the new fort mutinied; Fateh Khan Tiwana, left in command, was cut down when he opened the gates after ten days of siege, and Muhammad Azim Khan, a son of Dost Muhammad of Kabul, held the empty fort until Lieutenant Reynell Taylor retook it. [5, 6] After the annexation of March 1849 Taylor was the first deputy commissioner, John Nicholson served from 1852 to 1855, and Bannu became a district in January 1861. [5, 6]

Under the British

Bannu stayed quiet in 1857, which the Gazetteer credits to Nicholson's firm and popular administration. [5] The Church Missionary Society opened work in 1864, with a hospital that had "a wide reputation on both sides of the frontier". The town got a municipality in 1867 and a cantonment around the fort, which held a mountain battery, a cavalry regiment and two of infantry in 1908; the nearest railway station was at Kohat, 79 miles away. [6]

The British thought little of the Bannuchis. Edwardes called them "bad specimens of Afghans", and the Imperial Gazetteer says they "exhibit every Afghan vice, without possessing the compensating virtues of bravery and self-confidence", while granting that they were industrious cultivators and quiet subjects. [4, 6] These are the judgments of officials about a population they had disarmed, and the same Gazetteer calls the Marwats "frank and open". [6] Thorburn recalled only a few Bannuchis and no Marwat asking him for alms, where hill men often did. [3]

The Faqir of Ipi and the borderland

In 1930 Haroon says two Bannu-based activists, Abdul Jalil and Fazal Qadir, tried to raise Waziristan, and a lashkar of 1,400 Wazirs set out for Bannu. [7] In 1936 a Hindu girl in Bannu who had become a Muslim and married a Pakhtun was ordered by the court to live with a third party until she came of age, because she was a minor and the court found no evidence of abduction or of legal consent. Haroon says the Muslims of Bannu heard the order "with great anger as a government decision in favour of the Hindu community over the Muslim one". [7] That case was the start of the campaign of the Faqir of Ipi, who had settled at Ipi in the Tochi valley.

In 1947 Bannu was where the Frontier Congress decided to stay out of the referendum on Pakistan. Sir Olaf Caroe telegraphed on 23 June that Abdul Ghaffar Khan had announced the Congress decision to boycott it at a large public meeting in Bannu on the evening of the 22nd. [1] Bacha Khan's statement of 24 June said the choice of joining India or Pakistan limited the voters to "two alternatives, neither of which we are prepared to accept" and asked for the opportunity to vote for a free Pathan state. [1] The referendum and its result are in the partition article and Bacha Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgar.

Language

The Gazetteer of 1883 says Pashto was spoken by Wazirs, Bannuchis, Marwats and Bhittanis throughout the Bannu and Marwat tahsils, while the Niazis in the east had largely forgotten it. All followed "the soft pronunciation", but Wazirs, Bannuchis, Khattaks and Marwats each said the vowels differently and had many words of their own. It called Marwat and Khattak speech nearer each other and easier for an Englishman than Wazir. Thorburn's story shows the distance: a Yusufzai orderly translated for him to a Bannuchi villager, who shook his head and said, "speak Pashtu as I dont know Hindi". [5] For the sound system behind this, see Pashto dialects: soft and hard speech.

Who lives there and how many

The Imperial Gazetteer gave the district 226,776 people at the census of 1901. It counted 201,720 Muslims, 22,178 Hindus and 2,673 Sikhs, and about 129,000 Pashtuns (56 per cent): Marwats 52,000, Bannuchis 30,000, Wazirs 24,000 and Bhittanis 2,000. The rest included Jats, Awans, Sayyids (12,000) and the trading Aroras. [6]

The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics counted 1,210,183 people in Bannu district in 2017 and 1,357,890 in 2023, up from 695,260 in 1998. In 2023 these were census counts, and 1,309,492 of the people lived in rural areas and 48,398 in urban ones. Of the 2023 total, 1,342,395 gave Pashto as their mother tongue (98.9 per cent); Urdu (4,511), Punjabi (4,395) and Hindko (165) are the largest of the others. [8] The district is smaller now than in 1908, so the 1901 and 2023 totals are not a series.

Land and work

The central valley is highly irrigated, and in 1908 about 30 per cent of the cultivated area was irrigated, nearly all from canals cut from the Kurram and the hill streams, many of "an extreme antiquity". Wheat covered 49 per cent of the net cultivated area in 1903 to 1904, and agriculture supported 75 per cent of the population. [6] Edwardes wrote of the mulberries, limes and melons, and added: "nature has so smiled on Bunnoo, that the stranger thinks it a paradise; and when he turns to the people, wonders how such spirits of evil ever found admittance." [4]

The town's trade in 1908 was cloth, livestock, wool, cotton, tobacco and grain, and the Friday market, with about 8,000 buyers and sellers, filled the central square inside walls that had seven gates closed at gunfire. [5, 6] Bannuchis and Marwats, Thorburn says, were "great stay-at-homes". [3]

Places to know

The Akra mound near the town is the valley's oldest known site, and the fort of Dalipgarh anchors the cantonment. [6] Sheikh Budin, the cone at the south-west end of the Marwat range, was the summer retreat for Bannu and Dera Ismail Khan. [6]

Displacement and violence since 2014

Pakistan's army began Operation Zarb-e-Azb in North Waziristan in June 2014, after the attack on Karachi airport. Dawn wrote that the operation, "aimed at eliminating Taliban militants", forced a large exodus "mainly to the nearby town of Bannu". [9] The authorities gave the figures and the reassurance. On 4 July the Bannu commissioner said 575,000 people were registered and 28,000 families had received money, and an army brigadier said rations had reached 70 per cent of families. [9] By 1 September the provincial authority had registered 1,016,559 people from North Waziristan, 74 per cent of them women and children, and a humanitarian coordination hub had been set up in Bannu. [2]

The displaced told a harder story. On 20 June thousands were stranded at checkpoints on the Bannu-Miranshah road. A tribal youth, Nasr Minallah, called the road "a sea of people heading towards Bannu", and Abdul Karim said he paid a trucker Rs 65,000 to move his family, accusing drivers of fleecing families. People in Bannu feared a food shortage, and families sheltered in schools or in the open. [15] The Express Tribune reported on 7 July that registration of people from Miranshah began three hours late, with no staff to form queues, and a displaced man, Ameer Rehman, said the thirst in the Ramazan heat was "unbearable". [10] Reuters reported in August that thousands of displaced women could not get aid because they had no identity cards and elders had forbidden them to go to distribution centres; a widow named Maimoona said guards would beat the women if they tried to enter, and Yasmin Akhtar of the aid group Khwendo Kor called the missing cards a major problem for widows and second wives. [16] A former tribal MNA, Aurangzeb Khan, told a press conference on 11 August that about 41,000 people in Bannu's camps still awaited registration and rations, and that the government treated the tribal displaced worse than it had treated the people of Swat. [17] Those are the speakers' claims, as the papers reported them.

The militancy came to Bannu itself. On 18 December 2022 detainees at the Counter-Terrorism Department compound took it over and held hostages. The Defence Minister Khawaja Asif said on 20 December that all the militants were killed in an army operation; the army spokesman gave 25 militants killed, three captured and seven surrendered, with one hostage and two commandos dead. [11, 12] The TTP said the fight was still going on the next day, and Arab News noted that no pictures were released. [12] On the Sunday before 19 July 2024 an attack on the Bannu cantonment killed eight soldiers. [13] On 19 July thousands of traders and party members marched for peace with white flags; the crowd moved towards the cantonment and shots were fired. Dawn reported one dead and 22 injured; a Jamaat-e-Islami leader blamed the security forces, and some officials suggested a scuffle between two groups. [13] On 21 October 2024 thousands gathered again. Speakers said the provincial government had not carried out the sixteen demands approved after a July jirga and that elders had been arrested for taking part in peace gatherings, claims Dawn reported as theirs. [14] For the wider war on the border, see the Durand Line.