Spin Ghar (Safed Koh): the White Mountain on the Afghan-Pakistani border

At a glance

• Spin Ghar (سپین غر, Spīn Ghar) is the Pashto name of the range that Persian speakers call Safed Koh. Both mean "White Mountain". Elphinstone noted that Afghans more often said Speenghur than Suffaid Coh. [3]

• The range stands straight above the Kabul river valley and runs east and west along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Its highest point, Sikaram, is given as 15,620 feet (about 4,760 metres) in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica. [9]

• Babur, describing Nangarhar in his memoirs, wrote that no riding road crosses the range and that nine torrents come down from it. [1]

• Its northern slopes look on the Shinwari and Khugiani country of Nangarhar, its southern slopes on the Turi, Jaji and Mangal country of the upper Kurram, and the Afridi hold Tirah under its eastern spurs. [3, 5, 7, 9]

• Tora Bora, a village given over to the anti-Soviet jihad in 1979, lies on its northern flank in Pachir wa Agam district of Nangarhar and was the ground of the December 2001 battle. [8]

The name

The Pashto name is spin ghar, "white mountain". Elphinstone, the British envoy who described the Kabul kingdom, gave the Persian name first and added in a footnote: "The Afghauns more frequently call this mountain Speenghur than Suffaid Coh. The former has the same meaning in Pushtoo that the latter has in Persian." [3] He wrote that it was named "from the snow with which it is always covered". [3] William Simpson, who drew the range from Jalalabad during the war of 1878 to 1880, was told by Professor Palmer that spin is also a Persian word meaning white. [4]

Babur gives the same reason three centuries before Elphinstone. In his account of Nangarhar he says the Safed Koh "runs along the south of Nīngnahār, dividing it from Bangash", that "no riding-road crosses it", and that it is called Safed Koh "because its snow never lessens". [1] Annette Beveridge's translation adds a note that the Pashto form is Spīn-ghur or ghar. [1]

Sikaram and the shape of the range

The 1911 Britannica entry calls it "in many respects the most remarkable range of mountains on the north-west frontier of India", a wall of about 14,000 feet "straight and rigid", running across the grain of the frontier hills. [9] Its highest peak, Sikaram, is 15,620 feet, "and yet it is not a conspicuous point on this unusually straight-backed range". [9] The same entry says the range divides the basin of the Kabul river and the Khyber route from the valley of the Kurram, "leaving no practicable pass across its rugged crest to connect the two". [9]

Elphinstone treated it as the start of the Sulaiman range. It stands south of the Hindu Kush, separated from it only by the Kabul river valley, "from which it rises with a very steep acclivity". [3] From it the main ridge runs south-south-east through the Jaji country, where the Kurram river cuts through it. [3] Olaf Caroe, a British frontier official who wrote The Pathans in 1958, says the range forms part of the Durand Line and that its crest never needed marking on the ground: "the range summit is unmistakable". [7] The line itself is told in The Durand Line, 1893.

Sikaram was climbed by outsiders in 1879. Simpson records that G. B. Scott of the Indian Survey made the first ascent by a European, and that Captain Gerald Martin went up from the Kurram side on 26 June 1879 with a party of officers and gave the height as 15,600 feet. [4] There was already a cairn, a ziaret, on the summit. Simpson says it could not be the tomb of a Sayid Karram, as some held, and was most probably the continuation by Muslims of the ancient custom of raising heaps of stones. Martin tried to find where the name Sikaram came from "without any satisfactory result". [4]

Snow, water and forest

In high summer, Elphinstone says, the Jalalabad plain is "intolerably sultry", while the mountain of Suffaid Coh "lifts its head, crowned with perpetual snow, immediately from the plain". [3] Simpson, at Jalalabad in 1878 and 1879, saw only a white crest on the eastern end and patches along the rest of the range at the end of November. The lower peaks whitened in January, and cloud kept leaving snow through February and March. [4] Elphinstone believed that no other part of the Sulaiman range kept snow after the end of spring. [3]

The water follows. Babur counts nine torrents, and says that many places along the range have an excellent climate and that "its waters are cold and need no ice". [1] Elphinstone says the high country under Suffaid Coh is called Nimgrahar or Nungnehaur, from the nine streams, nung being nine in Pashto and nehaura a stream. [3] Jalalabad stands on one side of the divide and the Kurram on the other, and The Pashtun lands: mountains, rivers and passes shows where the rivers go.

The slopes carry pine. The Britannica says the western slopes, where the range meets the mountains above Kabul, and the northern spurs that run down through Shinwari country towards Gandamak and Jalalabad are "forest-covered and picturesque", while the southern cliffs are sun-scorched and nearly bare. [9] In 1878 the Afghan breastworks on the Peiwar Kotal were built of "pine logs and stones", and the heights over the pass were pine-clad. [6]

The forest has been cut hard in recent years. In September 2003 Dawn's Landi Kotal correspondent reported that Afghan timber was piling up at Torkham, most of it from the forests of Kunar according to Afghans passing through. Residents of Nangarhar told him that a "timber mafia" in Jalalabad had started cutting the Spin Ghar forests at Debala, Roedad and Khugiyane. One of them, Tilawat Shah of the Surkh Roed area, accused the province's security chief Hazrat Ali and his men of cutting the forests for money. These are the residents' accusations as Dawn printed them, with no reply from the men named. [16] Hazrat Ali had led one of the two ground forces at Tora Bora two years earlier.

The people of the mountain

Bellew, a British surgeon-officer who wrote The Races of Afghanistan in 1880, says the northern base of the Safed Koh was held by "the Ghilji, the Khogiani, and the Shinwari" and the southern base by the Turi and the Khostwals. [5]

The north: Shinwari and Khugiani

The Shinwari hold the end of the Khyber beyond Landi Kotal and the valley under the northern face of the range. Bellew calls them "the great carriers" between Kabul and Peshawar, whose mules and donkeys were of superior breed and in demand in both cities. [5] The Khyber Pass places the western section of the pass in Shinwari hands, and the poet Hamza Shinwari came from Lwargai near Landi Kotal.

The Khugiani are the other great tribe of the northern slopes. Yunus Khalis, who led one of the seven Sunni mujahideen parties, was born in 1920 near Gandamak to a Khugiani family, of the Nabi Khel branch of the Ibrahim Khel, according to Kevin Bell's study of his life. [8] Caroe notes Raverty's theory that the Turi, Mangal, Jaji and the Khugiani of Nangarhar descended from Turkmen settlers, and rejects it. He prefers the view that their place in the Karlanri genealogy records a real kinship with the hill Pashtuns around them. [7]

The east: Afridi and Orakzai

Tirah lies in the foothills of the eastern spurs. [9] Bellew says that of the old Afridi lands the tribe kept the Kohat Pass, the Khyber, the Miranzai valley and "the uplands at the eastern end of the Sufed Koh range". [5] Caroe, writing in 1958, said the Afridi still admitted no stranger to their central fastnesses in Maidan, six to seven thousand feet up and about thirty miles from Peshawar. [7] The tribes are told in The Afridi and Orakzai tribe. Caroe adds that Tirah Maidan is "overlooked by the pine-clad summits of the middle Sufed Koh". [7]

The south: Turi, Jaji and Mangal

Elphinstone says the "Jaujees and Torees" live in "a deep valley" cut by the Kurram, and that the highest ridge passes through the Jaji country near Huryoob, twelve miles north of the gap where the Kurram pierces it. [3] The Official Account speaks of the Hariab valley and "Mangal country up to the Shutargardan", of "the Jajis of Paiwar" and of Jaji Maidan, a cluster of seven villages, and of the Turis of the Kurram valley. [6]

Caroe says the Turis are Shia and their neighbours Sunni, and that the difference gave quarrels a sectarian colour. [7]

Peiwar Kotal and the passes

The road from the Kurram valley climbs the Peiwar Kotal and drops west into the valley of the Hariab. [6] Beyond that the Shutargardan is, in the words of the Government of India's despatch of 7 July 1879, "a high ridge of the Safed Koh range", where the Kurram valley ends, and an army holding it "would command, on the one side Kabul and Ghazni, on the other, easy access into India". [6] The same despatch said the main defiles of the Mohmand and Afridi hills were held by independent tribes and had never belonged to the amirs of Kabul. [6]

In November 1878 a British column under Frederick Roberts entered the Kurram valley from Thal. Its written orders said that the Jajis and Turis, "having nothing in common with the 'powers that be' at Kabul or with the Afghan tribes, may be expected gladly to espouse our cause". [6] Some did. The Official Account prints a letter that reached the British on 21 November from the Sayyids of Kurram, who asked when the force would arrive and said the people were looking forward to it anxiously. [6] Major Collett's diary, quoted there, says the valley's people "regarded General Roberts' troops as deliverers from an oppressive government". [6] That is a British officer's report of what he thought he saw, and the Official Account itself says the Jajis and Turis seemed friendly after the battle but that tribes along the road were "evidently in doubt as to the future, and unwilling to commit themselves". [6]

The amir's army was under Muhammad Zaman Khan, and it had retreated over the Peiwar Kotal. [6] The road up from the Kurram was a "steep, narrow, zigzag path" commanded from the heights, every point exposed to fire from breastworks of pine logs and stones. [6] The Official Account lists the Afghan side on 2 December as regular regiments with eighteen guns and a large number of Jajis and other local fighters, put at four thousand or more, and says captured stores showed the Afghan government meant to hold the position all winter. [6] On 2 December Roberts's force attacked the Afghan left at the Spingawai Kotal and sent a column round to threaten the line of retreat. When the Afghans saw it they broke, and by half past two the Peiwar Kotal was in British hands. [6] The British counted seventeen guns taken and gave their own losses as two British officers and eighteen men killed. They said the Afghan loss could not be estimated. [6] After the Afghan army withdrew, the British account says, the Jajis carried off the grain of the amir's store at Ali Khel. [6]

The Mangals fought on. When Roberts marched for Kurram by the Karmana road on 12 December, headmen at Karmana warned that Mangals would attack at the Sapri Kotal. The Mangals, about a hundred at first and then more, fired on the column's rear guard from eleven in the morning until four in the afternoon. The Official Account calls them "a bold and active enemy thoroughly acquainted with the locality". The British lost two officers and three Gurkhas dead and eleven wounded, and kept their baggage. [6]

Yaqub Khan ceded the valley in the Treaty of Gandamak of 1879, and Caroe says Roberts told the Turis that the Kurram river would run backwards to the Safed Koh before they returned to Afghan allegiance. The valley was then left unoccupied, and "chaos had reigned". The British set up an administration after the Turis' own plea that the only alternative to occupation was submission to Afghan rule. [7] That is Caroe's account of the Turi decision. Amir Abdur Rahman, he adds, was alarmed by the occupation of Kurram and the forward moves that went with it, and they led to the Durand mission. [7] Abdur Rahman Khan and The three Anglo-Afghan wars tell the rest.

Tora Bora: the base of the jihad

Tora Bora is the name of a village in Pachir wa Agam district. In Kevin Bell's account, drawn from two Pashto biographies of Yunus Khalis, it was the third base in Nangarhar that Khalis's party, Hizb-i Islami (Khalis), occupied in the late 1970s. [8] The party had left its first fort when ammunition ran out under a government attack, and the people of the Luy Wali valley, where it moved next, tried to push it out. [8] The Luy Wali snow was deep and the walk hard, so the fighters looked for a new site, and found it at a small village of the Suleiman Khel near Spin Ghar called Tora Bora. After consulting Khalis, the villagers decided their homes "would be given out of their own free taste and satisfaction as a charitable trust [waqf] to the jihad for the sake of God", and in 1979 the village became the base. [8] Bell notes that one of his two biographers, Din Muhammad, writes in Khalis's favour, and that little factual information about Tora Bora has reached Western readers. [8]

December 2001

After the Taliban left Jalalabad in November 2001, the men holding the province for the new government were Haji Mohammad Zaman Ghamsharik, the military chief, and Hazrat Ali, the chief of law and order. [13] Both had fought the Soviets. [2] They told reporters they would take Tora Bora themselves. Zaman said on 3 December that his forces had their own programme and might not need American support. [10] On 5 December an Afghan commander told Dawn that hundreds of Hazrat Ali's fighters had been driven back from the foothills of Tora Bora by heavy fire. The paper reported that the Afghan commanders insisted they wanted to take on the Arab fighters themselves, without American ground troops. [11]

The mountain's own people were under the American bombing. Afghan sources told Dawn on 3 December that 58 civilians had died in the bombing since Sunday. A meeting of elders in Jalalabad on the Monday passed a resolution asking the Americans to stop. Zaman said he had sent local elders up to Tora Bora to ask the non-Afghan and Taliban fighters to surrender. [10] Hazrat Ali told Pepe Escobar that the Eastern Shura had asked the Arabs to give up and that "Our Shura simply cannot keep them". [13] His front-line commanders said that "half of the Tora Bora is under our control, the other half under Al-Qaeda". [13]

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee's 2009 report, written from the American side, says the special forces relied on the two commanders, who "distrusted each other" and whose men withdrew from the mountain at dusk. [2] On the afternoon of 11 December, it says, Ghamsharik told the American commander that the al-Qaeda fighters wanted to surrender and needed a twelve-hour ceasefire. He called it "the greatest day in the history of Afghanistan" because "al Qaeda is no more". The Americans suspected a ruse, and by morning no one had come down. [2] Christian Science Monitor's Philip Smucker gives the Afghan side. Ghamsharik had first tried to arrange a UN-backed surrender, and he and other Khugiani men offered the Arabs safe passage. Afghan sources told Smucker that the Americans then put Hazrat Ali at the front instead. [14] A Saudi who was inside, Abu Jaffar, told Smucker that Ghilzai families had been paid with Kalashnikovs to smuggle fighters out. That is one man's claim. [14]

On 16 December the two commanders came down and said they held every cave in Tora Bora. Hazrat Ali said he thought 700 fighters had been in the mountains and 500 might have escaped, and that the last cave held six men. "A few days before I had information that he was here," he said of Osama bin Laden. "But now I don't know where he is." [15] A Pakistani intelligence source at Parachinar told AFP on 7 December, in a report Dawn printed, that the Arabs were moving towards Melawa and the White Mountains, which "stretch to the Parachinar area". Afghan commanders had said snowbound passes made escape into Pakistan impossible. [12] The Senate report says that bin Laden left Tora Bora on 16 December with bodyguards and, helped by Afghans and Pakistanis who had been paid in advance, reached Pakistan on foot and horseback. [2]

In June 2017 the mountain changed hands again. Local officials and elders told Radio Free Afghanistan that Islamic State fighters had overrun Tora Bora, and the Afghan defence ministry said its units recaptured it on 18 June. Hundreds of families fled Pachir wa Agam. [17] Later history of the province is in Afghanistan and the Pashtun lands since 2021, the earlier war in The Saur revolution, the Soviet war and the refugees, and the 2001 campaign in The Afghan Republic and the war, 2001-2021.