# The Gomal pass, the Zhob valley and the powinda road

> Each autumn the powinda Ghilzai came down the Gomal and Zhob passes to the Indus plain and went home in spring; the trade ended with the loss of the Indian markets in 1947 and the border closure after 1961.

- URL: https://www.pashtunxwa.com/articles/gomal-pass-and-zhob
- Subject: Geography
- Language: English
- Published: 2026-11-07
- Last updated: 2026-11-07
- Author: Pashtunxwa Editors

## At a glance

- Each autumn the powinda Ghilzai came down from the uplands around Ghazni to the Indus plain by the Gomal and Zhob passes, left their families and flocks on the grazing grounds near Dera Ismail Khan, and sent men with the camels as far as Multan, Delhi and Calcutta. They went home in spring. [2] [4]
- The Dera Ismail Khan gazetteer counted 76,403 people entering in the cold weather of 1877 to 1878 and 49,392 in 1880 to 1881. The Commissioner of the Derajat reckoned 50,000 people and 150,000 animals on the Gomal in 1901 to 1902. [1] [2]
- The traders among them, the Lohani and Sulaiman Khel, had stopped coming by the 1940s. The Indian markets were lost in 1947 and the grazing grounds at Dera Ismail Khan were closed to powindas after 1961. [4]
- Zhob town was called Apozai, after a Mando Khel village beside it. It was named Fort Sandeman in December 1889 and given back the name Zhob on 30 July 1976. [1] [8]
- The Gomal Zam dam, finished in 2013 at Khajuri Kach, holds 1.14 million acre-feet and has a command area of 163,000 acres. [6] [7]

## The road from Ghazni to the Daman

The powinda road is older than any British record of it. The Dera Ismail Khan gazetteer of 1883 to 1884 says the powindah tribes had traded between Hindustan and Khorasan by the Gomal pass "from very early times", and that most of them had their homes in the hill country east of Ghazni. [2] It adds that Babur, marching into the district in 1505, robbed Afghan merchants of the cloth, drugs, sugar and Tipchak horses they carried, and that his memoirs allude to the caravan route through the pass. [2]

Neeladri Bhattacharya, a historian writing in 2019 from the British records, describes the cycle. The families assembled every autumn on the plains east of Ghazni with their flocks, herds and strings of camels loaded with goods from Bokhara and Kandahar. The caravans crossed the Sulaiman range through the Gomal and Zhob passes and entered Dera Ismail Khan. There the families and flocks stayed on the great grazing grounds on either side of the Indus, while some men looked for work and others went on with the merchandise to Multan, Rajputana, Lahore, Amritsar, Delhi, Kanpur, Benares and sometimes Patna. In spring they gathered again and went home by the same road to the hills around Ghazni and Kalat-i-Ghilzai, and in summer the men took Indian and European goods on to Kandahar, Herat and Bokhara. [4]

The Zhob gazetteer of 1907 places the pass on the map. The Sulaiman range, it says, runs north and south, and its flanking ridges begin at the Ghwara Lara pass in the north-east corner of Zhob, where the Gomal river runs through the range. [1] The Gomal was not the only gate. The Dera Ismail Khan gazetteer says the mass of the powindahs entered by the Gomal and most of the trading ones took that road, while many sheep owners preferred the branch through the Zao pass, which comes out at Zirkanni. [2] Zhob lay on other roads too: the gazetteer lists the Gomal, Zao and Dahana passes, the passes about Kamr-ud-din Karez, and a Kakar Khorasan route of about 127 miles from Fort Sandeman to Kamr-ud-din Karez. [1] For the town at the road's end and the Daman plain, see [Dera Ismail Khan and the Derajat](https://www.pashtunxwa.com/articles/dera-ismail-khan-and-the-derajat); for the river and its course, [the Pashtun lands](https://www.pashtunxwa.com/articles/pashtun-lands-geography); for the mountain beside the road, [the Sulaiman mountains and Takht-i Sulaiman](https://www.pashtunxwa.com/articles/sulaiman-mountains-and-takht-i-sulaiman).

## Who travelled

The Dera Ismail Khan gazetteer names the leading powindah tribes as the Nasar, Sulaiman Khel, Kharoti, Mian Khel and Dotani, and the Ghilzai confederation they mostly belong to is described in [the Ghilzai](https://www.pashtunxwa.com/articles/ghilzai-pashtun-confederation). [2] Bhattacharya, working from the same records, sorts them by what they did. The Mian Khel were the richest and dealt in luxury goods. The Kharoti were the poorest and many worked as labourers. The Sulaiman Khel brought little merchandise but acted as brokers between powindah traders and Indian merchants. The Nasar, Dotani and Taraki were mainly herders. [4]

The Nasar were divided by animal. The gazetteer's account of 1883 to 1884 names the camel-folk (*Ushwals*), the ox-folk and ass-folk, and the sheep-folk (*Goshfandwals*). The poorer camel-folk came down first and carried goods for hire, bringing salt from the Kohat mines, Multani clay from the hills and gram from Marwat. The richer came later with grapes, almonds and madder. The ox-folk and ass-folk had no camping grounds of their own and took jobs carrying earth and bricks in the towns. They arrived at the end of September; the sheep-folk came in October. [2]

The Mian Khel had fourteen camps near Daraban and Musazai, about 4,500 men and 4,000 to 5,000 camels, and came in November and left in May. [2] The Zhob gazetteer says they came down the Gomal, went on to the Daman by Ghwara Lara and Dahana Sar, left their families there and traded in cloth at Calcutta and Delhi. [1]

Zhob had its own share of the traffic. The same gazetteer says the Sulaiman Khel wintered in the Fort Sandeman tahsil, the Dotani came from Waziristan in October to graze, and these Ghilzai families generally arrived between October and December and went home in April and May. [1]

## What the caravans carried

The Dera Ismail Khan gazetteer gives a rough yearly value, which the Zhob gazetteer repeats. Imports from Khorasan came to Rs 21,95,000: dried and fresh fruit Rs 7,00,000, madder Rs 6,00,000, raw silk Rs 5,00,000, then wool, charas, horses (Rs 65,000), asafoetida and tobacco. Exports to it came to Rs 19,07,000: indigo and English and country cotton cloth, six lakh each, then tea, shoes and leather, salt, sugar, metal goods and crockery. [1] [2] By centre, the Zhob gazetteer says Bokhara sent silk, charas, gold and silver thread and furs; Kabul pistachios and fresh fruit such as apples and grapes; Kandahar almonds, pistachios, raisins, dried fruit and wool from the Kakar country; Ghazni madder, wool, ghi, tobacco and asafoetida. [1]

Mr Merk, the Commissioner of the Derajat, wrote in his report for 1900 to 1901 that the Gomal was the most direct road to Khorasan but that through traffic was being drawn away to more modern lines. What still came by the Tochi, the Gomal and the Dahana, he thought, supplied the people east of a line from Kalat-i-Ghilzai to Ghazni. [1] Bhattacharya reads the later history differently: the powindahs, he writes, suffered more from the limits on moneylending in India and from the decline of the Central Asian trade than from trouble over grazing, and some combined the caravan march to the frontier with railway travel inside India. [4]

## Taxes, guns and the passes

The road had costs. In 1896 the British noticed that the powindahs going through Zhob were taxed three times: in Afghanistan, in Zhob, and in Dera Ismail Khan and the Punjab. The Punjab government and the Agent to the Governor-General agreed to tax them once, at Zhob rates, and to share the proceeds three-fifths to the Punjab and two-fifths to Zhob. [1] Bhattacharya says grazing taxes (*tirni*) trebled between the 1870s and the 1920s, and that disarming the powindahs at the British border left their camps open to Waziri attack that the border posts could not stop. They changed routes to avoid the posts, refused to pay *tirni* and took back animals the state had seized. [4]

Akbar S. Ahmed, a Pakhtun anthropologist who was Political Agent in South Waziristan in 1978 to 1980, describes the border crossing from the nomads' side: arms were surrendered at the check-posts between Afghanistan and British India, and routes and camping grounds were chosen with the border posts and their staff in mind. Some were to be avoided, some negotiated and some got round. [3]

The British side of the story is in the gazetteers. The Dera Ismail Khan gazetteer says Wazirs had long plundered powindah caravans in the pass, and that the route would not be safe until some arrangement was reached with the government in Kabul. [2] After the occupation of Zhob the Zhob gazetteer describes the arrangement: caravans were met at the Afghan border, escorted by the Zhob Levy Corps to a camping ground near Gulkach, and then passed on by stages to Khajuri Kach and Toi Khula, where the Southern Waziristan Militia took them. It adds that the powindahs lost nothing in Zhob or on the Gomal. [1] The Sulaiman Khel, the gazetteer says, were friendly when the Gomal was opened in 1889 to 1890, and a military post was placed at Gulkach in 1891. It also says that friendliness brought them into "bad odour" with the Afghan government, and that their chiefs Muhammad Akram and others kept out of its reach in 1891 to 1893. [1]

## The Gomal nomads in their own words

Ahmed's paper "A Taste for Freedom" is the closest account from inside a Pashtun view. The Sulaiman Khel and Dotani he knew used the Gomal route to enter Pakistan, and some had settled along the river. They called themselves *De Gomal Khalq*, the people of Gomal. [3] They moved down the river in autumn and back in early spring, travelling a *parowa*, a daily stage of about eight or nine miles, with camels, sheep and goats. Their stronghold was the Zarmelan plain, which Ahmed found "an arid, dusty bowl of rock and sand" that the Wazirs and Mahsuds left to them. [3] He counted them at 1,513 Sulaiman Khel and 2,383 Dotani in the census of 1972, and said the figures were suspect, because the tribesmen preferred to be vague with the administration. [3]

His argument is that these nomads lived between states by choice. They gave two ideals, *azadi* (freedom, owing allegiance to no political system or man) and *tor*, the guarding of women's honour, and said migration let them keep both. [3] A man could be recorded as "out" on migration while a brother held one to four acres on the Gomal, which was a useful hideout when trouble came across the border. [3] Ahmed also records their account of the name Ghilzai. They reject the tale that Ghil means a thief and say it comes from *khas*, the land they once owned in Afghanistan, so *khas zoi*, sons of the land of khas. [3] And he gives a proverb that the Gomal nomads use for the Ghilzai and the Durrani:

> *Badshahi da Durrani, tura da Ghilzai*
>
> Kingship belongs to the Durrani, but the sword (power, honour, etc.) belongs to the Ghilzai. [3]

## Closures and what ended the road

Bhattacharya, citing the French anthropologists Daniel Balland and Charles Kieffer, dates the decline in three steps. The Lohani and Sulaiman Khel, the groups most involved in trade, had stopped coming to India by the 1940s, while the Dotani and Taraki herders kept coming in large numbers. The Indian markets were lost finally at the Partition of India in 1947. The grazing grounds of Dera Ismail Khan were closed to powindahs after 1961. [4] On the partition itself, see [the 1947 referendum](https://www.pashtunxwa.com/articles/partition-and-the-1947-nwfp-referendum), and on the boundary the powindahs now had to cross, [the Durand Line](https://www.pashtunxwa.com/articles/durand-line-1893).

Ahmed gives the cause of the second closure. In the early 1960s, he writes, President Ayub Khan, reflecting the worsening relations with Afghanistan, ordered the border closed to the powindahs, which caused severe dislocation and hardship. The Gomal nomads still came by unfrequented paths such as the Gomal, but their span of migration shortened: they could graze freely in the Tribal Areas, where there were no police, but fewer reached the Punjab. [3] He calls 1979, when Soviet troops entered Afghanistan, the most critical year in the recent history of the Gomal nomads. A Scouts post had been set up at Zarmelan during his own term, on the route the nomads used, and many men now left their families with kin along the Gomal and took turns to go to the jihad in Afghanistan with old .303 rifles. [3]

The later numbers come from Pakistani research. Anwar Shaheen of the University of Karachi writes that the Afghan Kuchi population fell from about two million before 1979 to roughly half by 2000, that drought in 1998 to 2000 killed 80 per cent of their livestock, and that in the 1980s thousands of powindas were given Afghan refugee status on the promise of not migrating. [5]

## Zhob and Apozai

The Zhob river rises at the Tsari Mehtarzai pass and runs north-east to join the Gomal near Khajuri Kach. [9] The Zhob gazetteer puts its length at about 240 miles. The 2023 census report gives 410 kilometres, about 255 miles. [1] [9] Its valley lay beside the Gomal road, and the British officials saw that: the gazetteer says a visit to Apozai in 1888 showed the valley's importance, because it turned the difficult country about the Takht-i Sulaiman and flanked "the great Gomal caravan route to Ghazni and Kandahar". The Government of India, it says, decided to occupy Zhob and open the Gomal route for communication with Afghanistan at the same time. [1]

The gazetteer tells the occupation through its own officers. In 1888 Sir Robert Sandeman, the Agent to the Governor-General in Balochistan, was invited to Apozai by the Mando Khel chief Malik Khanan Khan, and the gazetteer says the Mando Khel there petitioned to be taken under British protection and offered revenue. [1] That is the British account, written in 1907 by the occupying power. Sandeman came back in December 1889 and reached Apozai on 26 December, to find that Khanan Khan had died two days earlier. His sons Akhtar Khan and Akram Khan met the party, and a *darbar* was held. [1] A site for a cantonment was chosen about two miles from the village, "afterwards appropriately named Fort Sandeman", and Sandeman left on 22 January 1890 for the Gomal pass. [1]

The town's Pashto name is Apozai. The gazetteer says the people of the country knew the place as Apozai, after a village of the Apozai section of the Mando Khel close to the town, and that it took its other name from its founder. [1] The Express Tribune reported in 2019 that Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had the name changed to Zhob on 30 July 1976. [8] The same report says the Balochistan government signed an agreement that year with the Walled City of Lahore Authority to help restore the old Sandeman Fort. [8]

## The tribes of Zhob

The Fort Sandeman tahsil, which was the core of Zhob, was mostly Pashtun. The 1901 census, as the Zhob gazetteer gives it, counted 34,712 people in the tahsil, and of the 29,098 indigenous Muslims, 11,963 were Kakar (11,782 of them Sanzar Khel, with the Kibzai, Abdullazai and Alizai the main sections), 4,276 Mando Khel, 6,974 Sherani, 5,076 Ghilzai and 966 Sayyids. [1] The Ghilzai in that count were the powindahs, since the gazetteer says the trade of the country was in the hands of the Ghilzai powindahs, the Pakhezai Abdullazai and Hindus. [1]

The Mando Khel have their own tradition. The gazetteer says they came from Nawar in Khurasan and, with the Musa Khel and the Sanzar Khel Kakar, defeated the Mughals and turned them out of the country. [1] The genealogies make them descendants of Mando, one of Ghurghusht's three sons and a cousin of Kakar, and so part of the line treated in [Gharghasht](https://www.pashtunxwa.com/articles/gharghast). The gazetteer notes that the census wrongly classed them as Panri. [1] They held the country round Fort Sandeman, with Apozai, Kam Gustoi and Buranj their chief villages. Their main work was farming, and one section, the Sulaimanzai, kept flocks. They owed allegiance to the Jogizai chief of Central Zhob but always had a headman of their own. [1]

Zhob people travelled too, in the other direction. Many Haripal and some Babar, Bargha Sherani, Mando Khel and Kibzai left every April for Siahband, Herat and Maimana to gather asafoetida, and came home in October. A considerable number of Kibzai, Abdullazai, Mando Khel and Babar spent two or three years at a time at Kandahar, Herat and Turkistan dealing in sheep and sheepskin coats. [1] The 2023 census report lists the Kakar, Ghilzai Tareen, Mandokhel and Sherani among the Pashtun tribes of Balochistan. [9] The Sherani, who hold the Takht-i Sulaiman and now have a district of their own, are covered with the mountain in [its article](https://www.pashtunxwa.com/articles/sulaiman-mountains-and-takht-i-sulaiman).

## The Gomal Zam dam

The Gomal Zam dam stands in the Khajuri Kach area of South Waziristan, near where the Zhob joins the Gomal, at a place where the convoys of the 1890s had a picquet. [1] [6] [9] Water and Power Minister Khwaja Muhammad Asif inaugurated it on Thursday 12 September 2013 with the United States ambassador, the governor of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the chairman of the Water and Power Development Authority present. Dawn reported that he hoped for a "green revolution" in South Waziristan, Tank and Dera Ismail Khan, and said the project would produce 17.4 megawatts and protect those districts from floods. [6]

The Water and Power Development Authority describes it as a roller-compacted concrete curved gravity dam, 437 feet high, completed in June 2013. Gross storage is 1.140 million acre-feet and live storage 0.892. The main canal is 60 kilometres long with 369 kilometres of distributaries and a command area of 163,000 acres, and the Waran canal commands 28,053 acres. [7]

## Sources
1. [Baluchistan District Gazetteer Series, vol. II, Zhob District (Bombay: Times Press, 1907), pp. 8, 40-44, 52, 56, 76-77, 80-81, 85-86, 198-202, 211, 249, 294-296](https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.39423) (Colonial record): The Ghwara Lara pass, the occupation of Zhob and Apozai in 1888-1890, the Mando Khel and Kakar, powindah routes, taxes, convoys, Sulaiman Khel and trade figures, 1901 census of the Fort Sandeman tahsil. Read in the archive.org OCR text.
2. [Gazetteer of the Dera Ismail Khan District, 1883-84 (Lahore: Punjab Government), pp. 26-29, 76-78, 142-143](https://archive.org/details/gaz-dera-ismail-khan-1883) (Colonial record): Powindah classes and tribes, the Nasar, Kharoti, Sulaiman Khel and Mian Khel, entry counts for 1877-78 and 1880-81, Babur and the Gomal, the value of the trade. Read in the archive.org OCR text.
3. [Akbar S. Ahmed, "A Taste for Freedom: The Case of the Gomal Nomads" (Khyber.org copy, from the author's fieldwork as Political Agent, South Waziristan, 1978-1980)](http://www.khyber.org/publications/006-010/gomalnomads.shtml) (Modern scholarship): The Gomal nomads' own terms (De Gomal Khalq, azadi, tor), their yearly cycle, the Zarmelan plain, the Ayub Khan closure of the early 1960s and the effect of 1979. Read in full through a Wayback Machine copy.
4. [Neeladri Bhattacharya, "Pastoralists in a Colonial World", Suedasien-Chronik / South Asia Chronicle 9 (Berlin: Humboldt-Universitaet, 2019), pp. 17-19](https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/bitstreams/75381e9b-d80b-4868-bb6f-c0efdf617c32/download) (Modern scholarship): The seasonal cycle of the powindahs, their divisions by occupation, colonial taxes and disarming, and the dates 1940s, 1947 and 1961. Read the PDF text of the powindah section.
5. [Anwar Shaheen, "Living on the Margins: A Socio-historical Profile of the Nomads in Pakistan", Pakistan Perspectives 16:1 (2011), pp. 52, 68-69](https://journal.psc.edu.pk/index.php/pp/article/download/228/227) (Modern scholarship): Kuchi numbers before 1979 and in 2000, the drought of 1998-2000 and the refugee status given to powindas in the 1980s. Read the PDF text of the cited passages.
6. ["Gomal Zam dam in South Waziristan inaugurated", Dawn, 13 September 2013](https://dawn.com/news/1042480) (News or magazine): The inauguration, who attended and the minister's stated hopes.
7. [Water and Power Development Authority, "Gomal Zam Dam"](https://wapda.gov.pk/gomal-zam-dam/) (Reference work): Dam type, height, completion, storage and canal figures.
8. [Mohammad Zafar, "WCLA to help restore historic Sandeman Fort in Zhob", The Express Tribune, 15 September 2019](https://tribune.com.pk/story/2056783/wcla-help-restore-historic-sandeman-fort-zhob) (News or magazine): The 30 July 1976 renaming under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and the 2019 restoration agreement for the fort.
9. [Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, 7th Population and Housing Census 2023: Provincial Census Report, Balochistan, pp. 29, 37-38](https://www.pbs.gov.pk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Provincial-Census-Report-2023-Balochistan.pdf) (Primary source): The Zhob river's source, course and length, and the Pashtun tribes of Balochistan.

## Common questions

### What was the powinda road?

It was the yearly route of the powinda Ghilzai from the uplands around Ghazni over the Sulaiman range by the Gomal and Zhob passes to the grazing grounds near Dera Ismail Khan. Families and flocks stayed on the plain for the winter while men took camels loaded with goods on to Delhi and Calcutta. They returned in spring.

### What ended the powinda trade through the Gomal?

Neeladri Bhattacharya says the Lohani and Sulaiman Khel traders had stopped coming by the 1940s, the Indian markets were lost in 1947, and the Dera Ismail Khan grazing grounds were closed to powindas after 1961. Akbar S. Ahmed says President Ayub Khan ordered the border closed to them in the early 1960s, and that the war of 1979 disrupted what was left.

### Why was Zhob called Fort Sandeman?

The town was Apozai, after a nearby Mando Khel village. The British occupied it in December 1889 and named the cantonment Fort Sandeman after Sir Robert Sandeman, their Agent in Balochistan. Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had the name changed to Zhob on 30 July 1976.

### Which Pashtun tribes live in Zhob?

The 1901 census of the Fort Sandeman tahsil counted Kakar (mostly Sanzar Khel), Mando Khel, Sherani, Ghilzai and Sayyids. The Mando Khel, who hold the country around the town and the village of Apozai, trace descent from Mando, a son of Ghurghusht.

### What is the Gomal Zam dam?

It is a concrete gravity dam on the Gomal at Khajuri Kach in South Waziristan, 437 feet high and completed in 2013. The Water and Power Development Authority gives it gross storage of 1.14 million acre-feet and a command area of 163,000 acres, with 17.4 megawatts of power.

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Cite as: Pashtunxwa, "The Gomal pass, the Zhob valley and the powinda road", https://www.pashtunxwa.com/articles/gomal-pass-and-zhob (last updated 2026-11-07).