# Kohat and the Kohat Pass: Bangash and Khattak country on the Peshawar road

> Kohat is a district town of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Bangash and Khattak country 1,700 feet up and forty road miles south of Peshawar. The Kohat Pass joins them, and the Adam Khel Afridi who hold it fought the British there in 1850 and now make guns at Darra Adam Khel.

- URL: https://www.pashtunxwa.com/articles/kohat-and-the-kohat-pass
- Subject: Historical places and regions
- Language: English
- Published: 2026-11-04
- Last updated: 2026-11-04
- Author: Pashtunxwa Editors

Kohat is a town and district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 1,700 feet above the sea in a ring of hills south of the Peshawar valley. [1] Forty miles of road over the Kohat Pass join it to Peshawar. [5] The Bangash hold its west and the Khattak its east, and both had taken the land from the Orakzai before Babur raided the town in 1505. [1] [4] The pass belongs to the Adam Khel Afridi, who guarded it for a British subsidy, fought over it in 1850, and now make guns at Darra Adam Khel, on the road to Peshawar. [3] [5] [16]

## Where Kohat lies

The Imperial Gazetteer of 1908 called Kohat the central district of the North-West Frontier Province: broken ranges trending east and west, with valleys seldom more than four or five miles wide. Hangu, to the north-west, stands at 2,800 feet. The Kohat Toi, the town's stream, dwindles to nothing before it reaches the town and surfaces again some miles lower down. In winter a cutting west wind called the "Hangu breeze" blew down the Miranzai valley to the town "for weeks together". [1]

The district then touched Peshawar district and the Jowaki and Pass Afridis on the north, Orakzai Tirah on the north-west, Waziri country on the south-west and the Indus on the east. In 1858 the Kurram river was fixed as its western edge. [1] The town lies in an amphitheatre of hills, and the Peshawar road climbs the Kohat Kotal three or four miles to its north. [1] [2]

The district of 1908 covered 2,973 square miles and included Hangu and Teri. Hangu and Karak are separate districts in the census tables now, and the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics gives Kohat district 2,991 square kilometres. [1] [12]

## The name and the first records

Tucker's settlement report of 1884 records a local tradition that two rajas of Buddhist times, Adh and Kohat, settled along the northern border: Raja Kohat gave his name to the town, and Raja Adh to the ruined hill fort of Adh-i-Samit, four miles west. [2] Elphinstone, who reached the town in February 1809, wrote it "Cohaut". [6]

The first written account is Babur's, as Tucker paraphrases it and Caroe retells it. In 1505, at Peshawar, Babur was talked into visiting Kohat "on the false hope" of a rich booty. He reached it through the Kohat pass in two marches, "fell on it at luncheon time", and took bullocks, buffaloes and grain. Going up the valley, he beat the hill men who crowded the heights and put up a minaret of their heads at the next camp. [2] [5]

## The Bangash and the Khattak

Rose treats both tribes as Karlarni by descent. The Gazetteer's tradition has the Bangash driven from Gardez and settled in Kurram about the fourteenth century, from where they spread east into Miranzai and western Kohat, "fighting for the ground inch by inch" with the Orakzai. The Khattak, it says, came from the Sulaiman mountains about the thirteenth century, settled in Bannu, and moved north two hundred years later after a quarrel with the ancestors of the Bannuchis. [1] Rose puts their earlier home in the Shuwal range of Waziristan, and says the Khattak, with the Upper Bangash, beat the Orakzai in two fights at Tapi and Muhammadzai near Kohat. [4] The tribes have pages on this site: [Bangash](https://www.pashtunxwa.com/tribes/bangash), [Khattak](https://www.pashtunxwa.com/tribes/khattak) and the [Orakzai](https://www.pashtunxwa.com/articles/orakzai-tribe-people-of-the-tirah-highlands).

Rose adds that the Bangash were disciples of [Pir Roshan](https://www.pashtunxwa.com/articles/pir-roshan-bayazid-ansari) and suffered Mughal expeditions for it. [4] Under Akbar the Khattak chief Malik Akor agreed to guard the country south of the Kabul river, and took a grant and the tolls at the Akora ferry. His family produced [Khushal Khan Khattak](https://www.pashtunxwa.com/articles/khushal-khan-khattak-poet-and-chief). [1]

Rose tells Khushal's war with the Bangash of Kohat from Khushal's own history. Sher Muhammad Khan, chief of the Malik-Miri Bangash, had revolted against Aurangzeb and been captured, released and won over. The Mughals gave him the Khattak fief of Tari-Bolaq, and Khushal's son Ashraf defeated the men of Kohat in the feud. Sher Muhammad returned from exile in 1673 and won over one branch of the Khattak, and Khushal, backed by the Afridi, was beaten at Kohat and wounded in 1675. Rose reads Khushal's account as ending "in his own defeat and the final establishment of the Bangash in their present seats". [4] The article on Khushal gives a victory over the Bangash in 1680, which Rose assigns to his son Ashraf, who took the fort of Doda from the Shadi Khel that year. [4] Ashraf is in [Ashraf Khan Hijri](https://www.pashtunxwa.com/articles/ashraf-khan-hijri), and his son [Afzal Khan Khattak](https://www.pashtunxwa.com/articles/afzal-khan-khattak) wrote the Khattak chronicle.

## Durrani, Sikh and Barakzai rule

The Gazetteer says Kohat became part of the Durrani empire in 1747, but authority ran only through the Bangash and Khattak chiefs. In the western Khattak country of Teri a junior member of the Akora family ruled as sub-chief, and the chiefship changed hands amid "assassinations and rebellion". [1] After 1818, Tucker says, Kohat and Hangu passed to Samad Khan, a Barakzai, and the local chiefs were overshadowed. [2] In 1836 Ranjit Singh gave the revenue of the whole district to Sultan Muhammad Khan Barakzai, who in the second Sikh war handed the British officer George Lawrence over to the Sikhs as a prisoner. [1] At annexation in 1849, Khwaja Muhammad Khan of Teri took the British side and kept his jagir. [1]

Elphinstone's mission passed through in February 1809, on the road to Peshawar. His party was met by the Bangash chief's son with "seven or eight hundred match-lock men, dressed in blue", and found a "neat town" with a little fort on a mound and a stream "as clear as crystal". [6] Caroe, retelling the visit, names them the Jangal Khel springs and notes that apples there bear fruit beside the mango, the only productive mango tree so far north. [5]

## British Kohat

The district was annexed with the Punjab in 1849. Upper Miranzai was proclaimed British in August 1851, and in 1855 a force of 4,000 men marched into the valley and enforced the revenue settlement. The district stayed quiet in 1857. [1] The new rulers began the road to Peshawar at once, and the road is what brought them into conflict with the tribes. [1] Kohat became one of the settled districts of the North-West Frontier Province when it was created in 1901. [7] A narrow-gauge railway from Khushalgarh to Thal opened in 1903. [1]

## The Kohat pass

The pass is one of the three exits from the Peshawar valley, with the Khyber and the Malakand, and Caroe says it is "known always as the Darrah, or the Pass". [5] Paget and Mason's official record of 1884 puts it at about twelve or thirteen miles from Aimal Chabutra to the south foot of the kotal. The summit stands 600 to 700 feet above the plain, water is scarce, and the villages of the Gallai Afridi, Zargun Khel, Sheraki and Bosti Khel, lie along it. The Gallai lived by carrying salt on camels to Peshawar, and in April 1849 the British had agreed to pay the Kohat Pass Afridi Rs 5,700 a year to keep the road safe. [3]

The trouble began on 2 February 1850, when a party of sappers building the road from Kohat to the crest was surprised by a large body of Afridi, and twelve were killed. Officers read the cause differently. Lieutenant-Colonel George Lawrence thought the chief cause was the road, which would open the hills to regular troops. Mr Temple, secretary to the Punjab government, blamed the Afridi's "innate ferocity" and a freebooter, Daria Khan. The report also says the avowed object of the attack was "to compel reversion to the rates at which salt was formerly sold at the Kohat mines". [3]

Sir Colin Campbell's force, with Sir Charles Napier, marched through the pass between 10 and 13 February 1850 and burned or destroyed Akhor, Zargun Khel, Khui, Sheraki and Bosti Khel, with nineteen killed and seventy-four wounded. [3] At the end of the month the Afridi, with the Bizoti and Utman Khel of the Orakzai, surrounded the police tower on the kotal until Captain Coke came up with Bangash levies and, after a conference between those levies and the besiegers, the attackers withdrew. [3]

The settlement of 1853 shows how the pass was held. The Afridi refused terms that would give the kotal to the Bangash, and Bangash picquets, set there, broke when the Afridi came up on them. The British shut the pass to the Afridi, whose living depended on carrying salt, and after the blockade they submitted. The allowances were then shared: the Bangash 3,200 rupees, the Orakzai 2,500, the Jowaki Afridi 2,000, the Pass Afridi 5,400 and the Bassi Khel 600, a total later raised to 14,600. [3] Caroe writes that the British were "compelled to enforce on the Adam Khel Afridis the right to passage" along the forty miles between Peshawar and Kohat. [5] The Afridi tribe is described in [The Afridi](https://www.pashtunxwa.com/articles/afridi-tribe-keepers-of-the-khyber), and the larger road in [the Khyber Pass](https://www.pashtunxwa.com/articles/khyber-pass-landscape-and-connections).

At the top of the kotal, Caroe notes, stands a monument to Handyside, a commander of Constabulary, with fifty miles of Khattak hills to the south and the Adam Khel valleys to the north. [5]

## Darra Adam Khel

Kohat itself had been "celebrated for its rifles", the Gazetteer says, but the trade "has now departed to the independent villages of the Kohat pass, where it flourishes". [1] Caroe says Zargun Khel, where Elphinstone camped, is "where the rifle factories now are", and calls the Adam Khel the people "who make the tribal rifles". [5]

Riaz Ahmad described the town for Dawn.com in December 2018. About 8,000 gunsmiths worked there, he wrote, most of them Punjabi or Sindhi "Hindustanis", while most dealers and shop owners were local Afridi. The workshops copy pistols and Kalashnikovs by hand, and 80 to 90 per cent of the guns go to Punjab and Sindh. Shipping them out of Darra is illegal, he wrote, but their sale in other provinces is accepted. Free electricity had ended, and some hoped the [merger of the tribal areas](https://www.pashtunxwa.com/articles/fata-merger-2018) would bring a regulated industrial estate. [16]

## Mollie Ellis, 1923

On 14 April 1923 raiders entered the bungalow of Major Ellis in Kohat cantonment, killed his wife and carried off their daughter Mollie, seventeen in Jayne Gifford's account and sixteen in Shakil Durrani's. [7] [8] Earl Winterton told the Commons two days later that the raiders had fired no shots, though the bungalow was next door to the General's, where there was a military guard. [9]

Gifford names Ajab Khan Afridi of the Bosti Khel and his brother Shahzada, and ties the raid to the Frontier Constabulary's seizure of rifles in February 1922. The brothers had tried to hide the rifles by dressing as women, the constabulary entered the women's quarters, and the Afridi women taunted them for allowing it. [7] Durrani calls it an insult to local custom that Ajab Khan swore to avenge. [8] Caroe says Mollie was carried through the Bosti Khel valley. [5]

Mollie sent a note to the Kohat deputy commissioner that she was "alive and fairly well, but very weak from living on bread and potatoes". Her captors wanted men held over the rifles. [7] The Chief Commissioner, John Maffey, sent Lilian Starr, a mission nurse whose husband had been murdered in 1919, with Rissaldar Moghal Baz Khan and a party of Orakzai. Kuli Khan had persuaded Mullah Mahmud Akhunzada to take Mollie into his keeping. On 22 April an Afridi lashkar began attacking the abductors' homes, Shahzada threatened Mrs Starr and Mollie, and the mullah, "enraged at the insult to the sanctity of his roof", cursed him in public. Mollie was surrendered in exchange for two Bosti Khel men held in Kohat jail for theft, and the party left with her on 23 April. [7] The old rule of the roof is in [nanawatai](https://www.pashtunxwa.com/articles/nanawatai-pashtun-refuge).

Gifford says Lord Reading refused Maffey's proposal of 1,000 rupees a month for life to Moghal Baz Khan and Kuli Khan as out of proportion to the honour given to Mrs Starr. [7] Durrani names Quli Khan Khattak, Mughal Baz Khan Afridi and Sheikh Mahboob Ali as the officials who organised the jirgas, and quotes Mollie: "I knew the Pathans didn't molest women." [8]

After the rescue, a jirga of the Adam Khel at Kohat on 21 May took on a fine of 50,000 rupees, the burning of the fortified villages of Ajab Khan and his relatives, the expulsion of outlaws, and a telephone line and wider road through the pass. A force went up to the kotal on 22 May, and Maffey saw the Bosti Khel houses "blazing merrily, the Afridis themselves doing the job". [7] Durrani says the gang was exiled to Afghanistan, that one member was arrested, tried and executed, and that Ajab Khan and Shahzada died natural deaths there. [8] He quotes the historian Elizabeth Kolsky: from the colonial view the kidnapping was an "outrage" that showed the tribes' "lawless savagery", while locally Ajab Khan and his men "were valiant heroes who boldly challenged an alien and oppressive regime". [8]

## Communal and sectarian violence

Kohat's worst communal violence came on 9 and 10 September 1924. Every account starts from the same pamphlet: songs by a Hindu from Jammu, sent to Jiwan Das, secretary of the Sanatan Dharm Sabha, with a poem that Muslims found blasphemous, written in reply to an anti-Hindu poem in a Muslim paper. The accounts then part.

The Government of India's resolution of 8 December 1924, as the Indian Quarterly Register prints it, found the immediate cause was the pamphlet, "an act of wicked folly" if deliberate, though the Sabha said it was accidental. It faulted the local officials for not prosecuting Jiwan Das under the penal code and for missing a Muslim oath of divorce taken the night before. It accepted the Chief Commissioner's finding that the riot began on 9 September with panic firing by some Hindus, who mistook the clamour of jeering boys for an angry mob and killed a Muslim boy. It called the great fires that followed incendiarism by Muslims in retaliation, noted that some police joined the looting, and said Muslim gentlemen helped escort Hindus out of the city. [17] On 9 October Mr Richards gave the House of Commons the casualties then ascertained: 6 police injured; Hindus 20 killed, 24 seriously and 62 slightly injured, 16 missing, among them 9 unidentified bodies counted in the 20; Muslims 11 killed, 6 seriously and 17 slightly wounded. [18]

The Muslim account, as the Register gives it, is that a crowd of small boys went down the main bazaar rapping their sticks on shop fronts, and shots from Hindu housetops killed one and wounded three or four, after which the crowd set the shops alight. [17] The All-India Muslim League, meeting at Bombay in December 1924 on a motion of Maulana Zafar Ali Khan, deplored the loss of life but said the facts showed "gross provocation" to Muslims, that the Hindus "were the first to resort to violence", and that Muslims had suffered too. It asked for a committee of both communities and urged Kohat's Muslims to invite the Hindus back. [17] At the Khilafat Conference at Belgaum, Dr Kitchlew held the riots to be due to Hindu firing, and Maulana Daud Ghaznavi told the Jamiat-ul-Ulema in January 1925 that Hindus had turned their homes into fortresses and fired on Muslims coming from the deputy commissioner's house. [17] Maulana Shaukat Ali, seconding the Congress resolution at Belgaum, blamed neither side, saying he was ashamed of such riots "be they due to Mussalmans or to Hindus". [17] Gandhi wrote in 1925 that he had "no difficulty about condemning the Mussalman misdeeds in Kohat", which he thought "utterly uncalled for", and that he and Shaukat Ali differed about Kohat. [11]

The Hindu account is the Kohat Refugees Working Committee's pamphlet of 1924, printed at Lahore for Lala Nand Lal of Kohat. It adds a quarrel over a tank the Hindus wished to build, which Muslim neighbours opposed because its water would pass through a mosque. It says the Sabha apologised on 2 September, that on 9 September a crowd demanded Jiwan Das's re-arrest, and that on 10 September armed men entered the city through breaches in the wall while over a thousand Hindus sheltered in the temple of Sthan Jogian. [10] A Hindu Maha Sabha meeting on 28 December 1924, on a resolution moved by T. Prakasam, put the loss at about 473 houses and shops burned, and called the official inquiry by a junior magistrate, who did not examine Hindus, grossly unjust to them. [17] Lala Lajpat Rai told the Congress there were "two, probably three" versions, the Hindu, the Muslim and the Government's. [17] The Viceroy refused a public inquiry, and talks between Kohat's Muslim Working Committee and the Rawalpindi refugees broke off on 19 December. [17]

The district has also seen Shia and Sunni killing. Abdul Sami Paracha reported in Dawn on 25 November 2008 that armed men killed four people, among them a woman, in a pickup coming to Kohat from Kachai, and that four more were shot in Hangu's Raisan bazaar. The victims were "both Shias and Sunnis". The attackers escaped into Orakzai Agency, and DSP Lal Fareed suspected the tribe behind a Kachai attack five months before, which had killed 26 people, "slaughtered and burnt by extremists from both sides". Elders of both sects were summoned at Hangu, and the Kohat-Hangu road was closed. [15]

## Who lives there

The 1901 census counted 217,865 people in the district of that day. Muslims were over 91 per cent, with 14,480 Hindus and 3,344 Sikhs. Pashtuns numbered 134,000, 61 per cent of the total: the Bangash of Miranzai and western Kohat, and the Khattak of the east and Teri. Awans, about 22,000, lived along the Indus. [1] Kohat town had 30,762 people, 12,670 of them in the cantonment: 19,807 Muslims, 7,833 Hindus and 2,832 Sikhs. [1]

The 2023 census gave Kohat district, in its present smaller bounds, 1,234,661 people, 22.58 per cent of them urban, and the statistics bureau lists the 2017 count as 1,111,266. [12] In 2017 the Kohat Municipal Corporation had 191,836 people and the Kohat Cantonment 36,719. [13] These are census counts.

Most of the district speaks Pashto. C. Shackle, writing on Hindko, found that the great majority of Kohat's inhabitants spoke Pashto, and that Kohati Hindko was confined to the city and the villages along the road east to Khushalgarh. [14] Caroe notes that the Khattak of Kohat, though sons of Koday, speak the soft variety of Pashto, while the Khattak of Akora and Mardan speak the hard. [5] See [Pashto dialects](https://www.pashtunxwa.com/articles/pashto-dialects).

## Life and work

Salt gave Kohat its trade. The quarries yielded 16,493 tons in 1903 to 1904, and the Gazetteer says Bahadur Khel shows "perhaps the greatest amount of exposed rock-salt to be seen in the world". Much of it went to Afghanistan, in the hands of Ghilzai, Mohmand and Afridi traders. [1] Kohat and its villages wove silk and cotton turbans, and the dwarf palm, *mazri*, gave sandals and baskets. [1]

## Places to know

- The Kohat Kotal, with its police tower of 1850 and the Handyside monument. [3] [5]
- The shrine of Haji Bahadur, in the old town just north of the dispensary, "a place of the greatest sanctity" in 1884, where oaths in disputes were sworn. [2]
- The Jangal Khel springs. [5]

## People

The Khattak chiefs of Akora fought the Bangash of Kohat, and their family is in [Khushal Khan Khattak](https://www.pashtunxwa.com/articles/khushal-khan-khattak-poet-and-chief), [Ashraf Khan Hijri](https://www.pashtunxwa.com/articles/ashraf-khan-hijri) and [Afzal Khan Khattak](https://www.pashtunxwa.com/articles/afzal-khan-khattak). Khushal's verse on the Adam Khel girls of the pass, quoted by Caroe, begins: "Fair and rosy are the Adam Khel maidens, / Among them are beauties of every type." [5] Cavagnari, who served more than a decade at Kohat and built the deputy commissioner's domed house, was remembered there for his tirelessness on horseback in pursuit of raiders. [5] For the road from Peshawar, see [Peshawar](https://www.pashtunxwa.com/articles/peshawar-history).

## Sources
1. [Imperial Gazetteer of India, vol. XV (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), 'Kohat District', pp. 341-350; 'Kohat Tahsil' and 'Kohat Salt Quarries', p. 351; 'Kohat Town', pp. 351-352](https://archive.org/details/TheImperialGazetteerOfIndiaVolXV) (Colonial record): Geography, climate, tribal history to annexation, the 1901 census, trades, salt, the rifle industry moving to the pass villages, railway of 1903. Read as OCR text.
2. [H. St. G. Tucker, Report on the Settlement of the Kohat District in the Punjab (Calcutta: Calcutta Central Press, 1884), paras 16-19 and 75-77](https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.21534) (Colonial record): The town in 1884, the shrine of Haji Bahadur, the dying rifle trade, the tradition of the rajas Adh and Kohat, Babur's raid of 1505 as Tucker retells it, Barakzai rule. Read as OCR text.
3. [E. Paget and A. Mason, Record of Expeditions against the North-West Frontier Tribes (Calcutta: Government Printing, 1884), ch. X 'Peshawar and Kohat Borders', pp. 316-331](https://archive.org/details/dli.pahar.1060) (Colonial record): The pass described, the Gallai and other Adam Khel sections, the 1849 agreement, the sappers of 2 February 1850, Campbell's expedition, the tower on the kotal, the 1853 settlement and allowances. Read as OCR text.
4. [H. A. Rose, A Glossary of the Tribes and Castes of the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province, vol. II A-K (Lahore, 1911), 'Bangash' pp. 87-89 and 'Khatak' pp. 627-631](https://archive.org/details/dli.pahar.1899) (Colonial record): Bangash and Khattak descent, their arrival round Kohat, Khushal Khan's wars with the Bangash of Kohat. Read as OCR text; the page numbers are those printed in the scan.
5. [Olaf Caroe, The Pathans, 550 B.C.-A.D. 1957 (London: Macmillan, 1958), pp. 22, 156-157, 244, 276-277, 330, 389-390 and the opening chapter on the Darrah](https://archive.org/details/dli.pahar.3135) (Modern scholarship): The Darrah as the Kohat pass, the dialect of the Kohat Khattak, Babur at Kohat, Khushal's verse on the Adam Khel girls, Elphinstone's visit, the Handyside monument, the Bosti Khel valley and Mollie Ellis, Cavagnari at Kohat. Read as OCR text.
6. [Mountstuart Elphinstone, An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul, vol. I (London, 1839 edition), Introduction, pp. 53-55](https://archive.org/details/anaccountkingdo01elphgoog) (Primary source): The mission's visit to Kohat on 22-23 February 1809: Dodeh, the Bangash chief's son, the town, the springs, the garden and the climb to the kotal. Read as OCR text.
7. [Jayne Gifford, ''A damnable blaze': John Loader Maffey, the North-West Frontier and the abduction of Mollie Ellis, 1919-1923', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 51(6) (2023), pp. 1114-1142](https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/90846) (Modern scholarship): The abduction, the rescue of 20-23 April 1923, Maffey's letters, the Adam Khel jirga of 21 May and the burning of the Bosti Khel houses; the creation of the NWFP in 1901. Open-access PDF read in full for these parts.
8. [Shakil Durrani, 'Payback and the Raj: the kidnapping of Mollie Ellis by Ajab Khan', The Friday Times, 23 April 2023](https://thefridaytimes.com/23-Apr-2023/payback-and-the-raj-the-kidnapping-of-mollie-ellis-by-ajab-khan) (News or magazine): A Pakistani account of the abduction, the officials who ran the jirgas, the aftermath, and the quotation from Elizabeth Kolsky on the two ways of seeing it.
9. [Hansard, House of Commons, 16 April 1923, vol. 162, cc. 1644-1645, 'Murder and abduction, Kohat'](https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1923/apr/16/murder-and-abduction-kohat) (Primary source): Earl Winterton's statement two days after the raid.
10. [Kohat Refugees Working Committee (printed by Lala Nand Lal), The Kohat Outrages (Lahore, 1924)](https://archive.org/details/VqyG_the-kohat-outrages-by-the-kohat-refugees-working-committee-lahore-1924-lala-nand-lal-kohat) (Primary source): The Hindu account of the pamphlet, the tank dispute and the events of 9-11 September 1924, in the Committee's own words. A party statement; read as OCR text, pp. 1-10.
11. [The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. XXVII (May-July 1925) (New Delhi: Publications Division, 1968), 'Notes', pp. 162-163](https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.56749) (Primary source): Gandhi on the 'Mussalman misdeeds in Kohat' and his difference with Shaukat Ali. Read as OCR text.
12. [Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, Census 2023, Table 1: area, population by sex, urban proportion, 2017 population and growth rate, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa](https://www.pbs.gov.pk/sites/default/files/population/2023/tables/table_1_kp_province.pdf) (Reference work): Kohat district area, population in 2023 and the 2017 count. Read from an Internet Archive copy of the PDF.
13. [Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, Census 2017, Table 2: urban localities by population size, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa](https://www.pbs.gov.pk/sites/default/files/population/2023/tables/table_2_kp_province.pdf) (Reference work): Population in 2017 of the Kohat Municipal Corporation and Kohat Cantonment. The file sits in the 2023 folder but is headed 'Population 2017'.
14. [C. Shackle, 'Hindko in Kohat and Peshawar', Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, vol. 43, section 1 (introduction)](https://archive.org/details/hindko-in-kohat-and-peshawar) (Modern scholarship): Pashto as the language of most of Kohat district; Hindko of Kohat city and the villages on the Khushalgarh road. Read as OCR text. Year and pages to be confirmed.
15. [Abdul Sami Paracha, 'Sectarian violence kills eight in Kohat, Hangu', Dawn, 25 November 2008](https://www.dawn.com/news/430312) (News or magazine): The killings of 25 November 2008, the Kachai clash of June 2008 and the local response.
16. [Riaz Ahmad, 'Darra Adamkhel's century-old illegal firearms industry is slowly dying', Dawn.com, 27 December 2018](https://www.dawn.com/news/1450617) (News or magazine): The gunsmiths, dealers, markets and electricity costs of Darra Adam Khel in 2018.
17. [The Indian Quarterly Register, vol. II (July-December 1924) (Calcutta: Annual Register Office, 1925): 'The Kohat Riot' and Government of India resolution of 8 December 1924, pp. 26-29; 'The Kohat Settlement', p. 31; Indian National Congress, Belgaum, pp. 431-433; All-India Muslim League, Bombay, pp. 481-482; Hindu Maha Sabha, pp. 486-487; Khilafat Conference and Jamiat-ul-Ulema (1925) sessions](https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.206698) (Primary source): The official resolution on the Kohat riot, the Hindu and Muslim versions, and the speeches and resolutions of the Congress, Muslim League, Khilafat Conference, Jamiat-ul-Ulema and Hindu Mahasabha. A contemporary digest of public affairs; read as OCR text. Page numbers are those printed in the scan and some are garbled.
18. [Hansard, House of Commons, 9 October 1924, vol. 177, cc. 726-727, 'Statement regarding the disturbances during August and September 1924 between Hindus and Moslems in India'](https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1924/oct/09/statement-regarding-the-disturbances) (Primary source): The Under-Secretary's note with the casualties ascertained at Kohat.

## Common questions

### Where is the Kohat Pass and what does it connect?

The Kohat Pass, called the Darrah or simply the Pass, crosses the hills between Peshawar and Kohat, about forty miles by road. It is one of three exits from the Peshawar valley, with the Khyber and the Malakand, and it runs through the country of the Adam Khel Afridi.

### Which tribes live in Kohat?

The Imperial Gazetteer of 1908 found the Bangash in Miranzai and western Kohat and the Khattak in the east and in Teri, with Awans along the Indus. Pashtuns were 61 per cent of the district's people in 1901. The Afridi hold the pass to the north.

### What is Darra Adam Khel known for?

It is a gunsmiths' town on the Kohat road. The Gazetteer of 1908 says the rifle trade had moved from Kohat to the independent villages of the pass, and Riaz Ahmad wrote in Dawn.com in 2018 that about 8,000 gunsmiths worked there, mostly Punjabis and Sindhis, with Afridi dealers.

### What happened to Mollie Ellis in 1923?

On 14 April 1923 raiders led by Ajab Khan Afridi killed Mrs Ellis in her Kohat bungalow and took her daughter Mollie. After a rescue party led by the nurse Lilian Starr and tribal officers, she was handed over on 23 April in exchange for two Bosti Khel men held in Kohat jail.

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Cite as: Pashtunxwa, "Kohat and the Kohat Pass: Bangash and Khattak country on the Peshawar road", https://www.pashtunxwa.com/articles/kohat-and-the-kohat-pass (last updated 2026-11-04).