The naqilin: Pashtun settlers of northern Afghanistan

At a glance

• The naqilin are the Pashtuns who settled north of the Hindu Kush, in Kunduz, Baghlan, Takhar, Samangan, Balkh, Jowzjan, Faryab and Badghis, from the 1880s onward. The sources translate the word as "immigrants". [4, 5]

• The first wave came under Amir Abdur Rahman: rebel Ghilzai and other tribes were exiled north, and families from Kabul and Kandahar were sent or persuaded to go. Kakar, an Afghan historian, records more than 18,000 families settled in Turkestan by the summer of 1886. [2]

• The second wave came from the 1930s to the 1950s with the cotton, sugar and irrigation schemes of Qataghan. By the mid-1960s Pashtuns were 56 per cent of the Baghlan area and 61 per cent of the Pul-i-Khumri area. [1]

• The settlements are the root of long disputes over land and water with Uzbek, Tajik, Turkmen and Arab neighbours, and each side tells the history differently. [1, 4, 9]

• After the Taliban fell in the north in November 2001, Pashtun villages were looted and thousands of families fled. Human Rights Watch recorded killings, rapes and displacement. [10]

Who the naqilin are

Most northern Pashtuns still call themselves naqilin, and Giustozzi and Reuter, writing for the Afghanistan Analysts Network, note that they remember precisely which provinces and tribes their families came from. [5] The word (given here in transliteration only) was used to tell the newcomers apart from the original inhabitants: Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmen, Arabs, Hazaras and others. [4] In Kunduz some Pashtuns are called Kandaharis, after the region their forebears left. [7]

The settlers came from both of the great confederations. Kakar names Garo Khel and other Ghilzai, Nasirs and Sulaiman Khel exiles, and families from Kandahar and its districts, among them Naozad and Zamindawar. [2] In the twentieth century the Shinwari of the east followed. [10] For the confederations themselves see the Ghilzai and the Durrani.

Abdur Rahman and the first settlements

Abdur Rahman Khan took the throne in 1880. In 1885, after the Russians occupied Panjdeh, he began a military colony in Turkestan. Its core was 2,000 Garo Khel Ghilzai given land in return for service. He added 5,000 families of other Ghilzai and 3,000 families from Deh Afghanan near Kabul. [2] Those sent to Maimana worked state land and kept a third of the crop, and Kakar infers they were cultivators, not owners. [2] Later settlers had better terms: road money, animals and three years free of tax on the land they were given. [2] The amir told the people of Kabul and the distant Ghilzai: "The Kafirs [Russians] are coming and this country [Turkestan] shall go out of our hands." [2] Kakar records that by the summer of 1886 more than 18,000 families were settled in Turkestan. [2]

Movement was also punishment. Kakar writes that prisoners from the south were deported to Turkestan and Qataghan, and that a penal colony was set up in Baghlan for men from Laghman and Kunar, to which 1,150 prisoners, among them Sulaiman Khel Ghilzai with their families, were added in 1890. [2] Some Nasirs, Zurmutis and Shaykh Ali Hazaras were sent to Khanabad and Turkestan. [2] In the other direction about 12,000 Uzbek families were deported from Turkestan to Kabul and Jalalabad. [2] Barfield, writing of Qataghan alone, says the amir could not persuade southern Pashtuns to go there and used it as a penal colony for his enemies. [1] Barfield speaks of Qataghan alone, while Kakar's count covers Turkestan as a whole.

Kakar also records the pauses and the failures. Settlement stopped during the Ghilzai rebellions and Sardar Ishaq's, and again when the Hazara war began, and it was not resumed in the amir's reign. [2] By June 1890 about 8,000 Kandahari families had settled at Bala Murghab in Badghis, yet officials mishandled the colonisation so badly that some Ishaqzai crossed to Panjdeh to winter under the Russians. One Ishaqzai herder told a visitor in Kandahar: "Were you to be subjected to the tyranny and oppression which we experienced at the hands of our Hakims every day, you would not pay great heed to religion and race." [2]

Chahrdara in Kunduz shows what the policy left on the ground. About 60 per cent of the district is Pashtun, mostly Omarkhel, and Cecchinel, writing for the Afghanistan Analysts Network in 2013, says most were settled there under Abdur Rahman. Tajiks and Uzbeks say the Pashtuns were given their land. The Pashtuns say they were forced onto land unfit for farming and still made to pay tax on it. [9]

The British and the north

British officers watched this with approval. Bleuer quotes Major Yate, who coined the term "Afghanisation", writing in 1893 that the non-Afghan tribes were the ones that had contact with the Turkomans and Russians and that "once encircled by Afghans they are safe". Captain Maitland, in the gazetteer of Afghan Turkestan, called the settlement encouraged by the amir "for obvious reasons" and predicted that the Turki-speaking population might be a minority in twenty or thirty years. [3] Bleuer notes that the historian Lee suspects the north was undercounted on purpose, so that it could be shown as empty. [3]

Historians are divided on what to call it. Bleuer says the campaign of "Pashtunisation" or "Afghanisation" has been read either as an extended ethnic cleansing or as a resettlement programme supporting Pashtun settlers. For the government in Kabul it was about controlling disobedient non-Pashtun areas and exiling rebellious southern Pashtuns, and for the British about keeping Russian influence out of the north. [3]

Cotton, sugar and the second wave

Nadir Khan, then war minister and later king, reorganised Qataghan in 1921 and confirmed the pasture titles of the nomads who held them. [1] The province was still thinly peopled. In 1935 a group of Afghan investors and the new governor, Shir Khan, began to drain swamps with forced labour, and Kunduz became the cotton centre of the country. In the 1940s the work spread to Baghlan, Pul-i-Khumri and Archi. A sugar-beet factory, cotton gins and mills followed, and the investors in the Spinzar cotton monopoly profited. [1] The cotton went to the Soviet Union by the Amu River port, later renamed Shir Khan Bander. [1] Münch notes that the Spinzar company, with state backing, brought modern capitalist farming to Kunduz from the 1930s. [7] In 1953 the government took half the company's stock. [1]

Cheap land and the end of malaria drew settlers, mostly Pashtuns from the south and Turkic refugees from the Soviet Union, and by 1965 the population had tripled since 1921. [1] Barfield writes that the central government encouraged Pashtun settlement to tie the border regions to Kabul. In the first years of reclaiming Kunduz and Khanabad land was sold and given freely, and the Pashtun share there stayed below half. By the 1940s the government wanted Pashtuns to have preferential treatment. [1] Barfield takes from Etienne's 1972 study the Pashtun shares of the mid-1960s: 56 per cent in the Baghlan area, 61 in Pul-i-Khumri, 41 in Kunduz, 45 in Khanabad and 10 in Taloqan, which kept its Uzbek majority. [1] He adds that the policy was not popular with the native inhabitants and the government had to defend it, though conflict stayed muted while land was plentiful. [1]

In 1947 a new scheme on the Dasht-i-Archi, watered from the Kokcha River, was settled exclusively by Pashtuns, among them people deported for the 1949 Safi rebellion in Jalalabad. Many were nomads, and they soon outnumbered the other nomads of the region. [1] The Shinwari began moving to Kunduz from the east in the late 1940s and, Human Rights Watch notes, came of their own will, though both the forced and the voluntary settlers were allocated land by the government and some neighbours lost farmland and pasture to them. [10] In Baghlan, Giustozzi and Reuter write, the first settlers rose quickly in the local hierarchy and integrated comparatively well, while later arrivals often ended as low-paid factory workers. [5] In Kunduz Münch says land was divided fairly equally among the Pashtun settlers, so a strong landlord class did not grow from them. [7]

Land, pasture and water

Where the settlers and an older group did not need the same pasture, they coexisted. Barfield's study of the Arab herders of Imam Sahib records that the government had kept Dasht-i-Ish as state pasture, closed to the Arabs, and that when the Pashtuns arrived at Archi they were granted title to it. Each group now holds its own area by the same type of title. [1] Small quarrels still happened. When an Arab accused a Pashtun camp of stealing sheep, the Pashtun answered: "Whenever you Arabs find something missing you say we Kandaharis did it!" [1]

Elsewhere the competition was sharper. The authors of a 2009 study for the Brookings-Bern Project say the second wave in the time of Zahir Shah was often put on newly irrigated land, at the expense of Turkmen, Uzbek and Tajik communities, and that some of the moves were not fully voluntary. They add that those moved received land, and many had been landless Kuchi nomads. [4] The resentments last, they write, where competition for land and water is highest. [4]

The wars of the 1990s and the Taliban

When the communist government fell, many non-Pashtun communities and commanders took over the land and property of Pashtun settlers. When the Taliban took power in 1996, Pashtun communities retook it and at times occupied the land of non-Pashtuns too, Mundt, Schmeidl and Ziai write. [4] Kunduz, where the Pashtuns were natural allies of the Taliban, became known as the Kandahar of the north. [5] Human Rights Watch reports that Uzbek refugees from Balkh described Pashtuns encroaching on their land with the backing of the Taliban-sanctioned administration, and that UN staff told the organisation this was often legitimised by altered land deeds. [10] In depopulated places such as Robatak, on the border of Samangan and Baghlan, Pashtuns settled on land that had been held by Hazaras. [10] The Taliban also carried out massacres: over 170 Hazara civilians at Yakaolang in January 2001, and at least 31 Uzbek civilians at Khwajaghar in Takhar. [10]

Human Rights Watch adds that many Pashtuns in the north took no part in the abuses against their neighbours, and that in some parts of the north the Taliban worked with non-Pashtun commanders. [10] See the Taliban emirate for the wider war.

After November 2001

When the Taliban collapsed in the north in November 2001 the balance reversed. Human Rights Watch sent four researchers to Balkh, Faryab, Samangan and Baghlan in February and March 2002 and published in April. It reported killings, rapes, beatings, extortion and looting of Pashtun villages by the Uzbek Junbish, the Tajik Jamiat and the Hazara Hizb-i Wahdat militias and by unaligned armed men, who exploited communities that had been selectively disarmed. [10]

The cases are specific. In the Shoor Darya valley of Faryab, where about 30 Pashtun villages lay, Junbish men took the villagers' guns but not those of other groups and then looted the villages over weeks, a time one villager called "forty days of terror". [10] At Bargah-e Afghani in Chimtal, Balkh, about 300 armed Hazaras arrived in early December 2001, two days after the villagers had handed their guns to a Junbish commander and been given a written receipt. They killed 37 men who had stayed behind, the largest documented killing of civilians since the Taliban fell. [10] At Deshdan Bala more than 80 of 100 Pashtun families had left by February. [10] A Jamiat commander told a Pashtun villager in Baghlan: "You are Pashtun. You don't belong in this area. You must leave for Kabul, and leave [this area] for us." [10] A Pashtun elder who described the abuse of his village by Hizb-i Wahdat fighters said: "The Taliban did the crimes, but the punishment was for us." [10]

Families moved from villages to towns, to camps and to Pakistan. Between January and 8 March 2002, 47,000 Afghans reached Pakistan at Chaman, and the majority of the newly displaced were Pashtuns. [10] Confidential sources told Human Rights Watch that over a thousand Pashtun families were displaced from Farkhar district in Takhar. [10] Hamid Karzai named a three-member commission and General Dostum removed some commanders and put new ones among threatened Pashtun communities, though others kept up the abuses. [10] The organisation also says that the local commanders and their soldiers, not the communities that had suffered under the Taliban, committed most of the abuses it documented. [10]

The national count of 2008, cited by Mundt and his co-authors, put the number displaced in the fall of the Taliban at 166,000, mostly in the north. [4] Many Pashtuns remained in camps in the south such as Zhari Dasht, where fewer than a quarter of the nearly 40,000 original residents had returned north after aid was cut in 2006. [4] In Jowzjan the authors found that of 150 families helped to return to Eadhan Afghanai, only 30 to 40 remained. Norwegian Refugee Council counsellors told them that disputes between returnees and local residents were usually settled, through jirgas, in favour of the locals. [4]

Life and politics since

Pashtuns in the north found few places in the new state. Giustozzi and Reuter write that poor rural Pashtuns struggled to get jobs in the administration and felt deprived, and that returnees from camps in Pakistan often found their land taken by other Pashtuns and by Tajiks or Uzbeks who refused to give it back. [5] In Chahrdara, Cecchinel found Pashtuns, though a majority, under-represented in the government and police, which were dominated by members of Jamiat. [9] The Afghan Local Police formed in 2010 were mostly non-Pashtun, and residents said they beat and extorted Pashtuns, which in her account revived tension between Tajiks and Uzbeks and Pashtuns and pushed some Pashtun communities toward the Taliban. [9] In Baghlan, Giustozzi and Reuter write, workers who lost their jobs when the factories closed or were destroyed in the civil war formed the core of the locally recruited Taliban. [5] See also the Republic, 2001–2021.

Since the Taliban returned in 2021, land has returned as a matter of dispute with them. In September 2022, in Khwaja Bahauddin in Takhar, former refugees from Pakistan, Pashtun and reportedly many of them Kuchi, claimed lands they said belonged to them, and fighting with the local Uzbek and Tajik residents left at least three people dead. [6] The Taliban police chief and deputy governor told the 400 families already living there to leave within three days. A prime ministerial committee then recognised the Pashtuns as the original owners but gave the Tajiks and Uzbeks 60 hectares nearby, since they had rebuilt the houses. [6] Foschini notes that a number of communities see the Taliban as backing the Kuchis, not as neutral mediators. [6] Elsewhere in the north there are few naqilin: Takhar, Badakhshan and Panjshir saw only limited settlement, and the local elites there have mostly been non-Pashtun. [8]

How northern Pashtuns tell it

The families remember where they came from, and the sources give some of their words. Pashtuns in Chahrdara say they were forced onto poor land and taxed for it. [9] An Ishaqzai herder in Kakar's account complained of the tyranny of the amir's officials. [2] Returnees in Jowzjan said, in the Brookings-Bern study: "If we had had another option, we would have stayed. If we had not been promised more than we received, we would not have returned." [4] A villager whose house Jamiat men had looted told Human Rights Watch: "I've complained only to Allah. Who hears our complaints? We will only get in more trouble if we complain. We have no power. Whoever has the guns has the power. We are sick of the guns, of the commanders. Take them all away and let us farm." [10]

Their neighbours remember differently. Tajik and Uzbek villagers in Chahrdara say land was given to Pashtuns. [9] Uzbek refugees described land taken under the Taliban. [10] Bleuer, who writes about how Uzbeks have been described, notes that the settlement policy is called Pashtunisation or Afghanisation, and that British writers of the 1880s and 1890s backed it. [3] Foschini writes that after 2001 it was those with less money, fewer connections and no protection who paid the highest price. [6]