The Mohmand tribe: Ghoria Khel Pashtuns of the hills and the Peshawar plain

At a glance

• The Mohmand (مومند) are a Pashtun tribe of the Ghoria Khel, the group that the Indian Army's 1910 handbook on the Pathans says moved east from the Tarnak and Arghastan headwaters with the Khalil and Daudzai tribes. [2]

• Two Mohmand countries lie on either side of the Durand Line: the hills between the Kabul and Swat rivers, now split between Pakistan's Mohmand District and Afghanistan's Nangarhar and Kunar, and the irrigated plain around Peshawar. [2, 3]

• The tribe has four main clans, Tarakzai, Halimzai, Baizai and Khwaezai, with the Dawezai, Utmanzai and Kukozai beside them on the north. [2]

• Mohmand lashkars (tribal armies) went out at Shabqadar in August 1897 and May 1908, and under the Haji Sahib of Turangzai between 1915 and 1935. [3, 5, 7]

• Rahman Baba and Hamid Baba, two of the great Pashto poets, were Mohmands of the Peshawar plain. [4]

• Mohmand became a tribal agency in 1951 and, with the merger of 2018, Mohmand District of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. [10, 20]

The name and the descent

Henry Raverty's Pashto dictionary of 1860 spells the tribe's name مهمند (mahmand) and calls it an Afghan tribe on the plain of Peshawar to the north-west. [9] The same dictionary gives the plain Mohmands a second name, Ghori (غوري), "by way of distinguishing them from those of the hills". [9]

Ghori points to the descent. The Handbook for the Indian Army, compiled by Major R. T. I. Ridgway in 1910, says the Ghoria Khel "included the Mohmands, Khalils and Daudzais", and that they followed the Khakhai eastwards and reached the western mouth of the Khyber early in the sixteenth century. [2] It also says the Chamkanni are traditionally supposed to belong to the Ghoria Khel section of the Sarbani Pathans, and that "by their Sarbani origin" they are related to the Mohmands, Daudzais and Khalils. [2] The Mohmand profile sets out the two Persian genealogies, the Makhzan-i Afghani and the Khulasat al-Ansab, which reach Mohmand through Ghura and Daulatyar in one and through Ghori in the other. Both are tribal tradition, written down centuries after the events. The Rahman Baba article records a Dawn feature of 2010 that puts the poet in the Sarban branch.

At the mouth of the Khyber, the handbook says, the Ghoria Khel divided. One part of the Mohmands crossed the Kabul river at Dakka and took the hills north of it as far as Lalpura. The rest went through the pass, beat the Dilazak near Peshawar and settled the plain. [2] Rahman Baba's best-known couplet puts the three tribes side by side in a line that begins "I am a lover" and ends "no Khalil, no Daudzai, no Mohmand"; they are the three Ghoria Khel tribes of the plain (see Rahman Baba). [2]

Hill and plain

The handbook says the hill, or Bar, Mohmands and the plain, or Kuz, Mohmands separated at Dakka and "have long ago lost touch with each other". [2] In the Imperial Gazetteer of 1908 the Mohmand country is about 1,200 square miles north-west of Peshawar, between the Swat and Ambhar rivers on the east and north, Kunar on the west and the Kabul river's watersheds on the south. [3] It divides the tract into the river lowlands from Jalalabad to Lalpura and a network of hills from Lalpura eastward. The hills could not support the population, it says, and Mohmand families were settling in the doabs of Peshawar District. The Gazetteer calls them Do-Kora, "two homes", because they seldom stayed through the summer. [3]

The plain Mohmands are different. The handbook puts their tappa immediately south of Peshawar, bounded on the north by the Bara river, about twenty miles long and twelve broad and mostly irrigated by the Bara. It calls them good, hard-working farmers who were well off, says their headmen took the title arbab, and counts 25,300 males in the census of 1901. [2] Raverty wrote in 1862 that the Mohmand tappa was one of the five divisions of the province of Peshawar, and that Rahman Baba lived at Hazarkhani within it. [4] Hamid Baba was born at Mashokhel, a village of the Kudrizi clan of the Mohmand tribe. [4]

In the hills the handbook finds farmers and cattle owners, and the boatmen of Lalpura, Goshta, Jalalabad and Kunar, called Nilaiji, who ferried rafts down the Kabul river. Mohmands living by the river levied heavy dues on them. [2] The Gazetteer adds dues on timber rafted down from Kabul, and says the routes through the hills lost much of their importance once the Khyber was opened. [3]

The clans

The handbook counts four main clans and says where each lived. [2]

• The Tarakzai held the hills north and west of Michni along the British border. Their Burhan Khel and Isa Khel divisions were in Pandiali and their Morcha Khel division on both banks of the Kabul river around Lalpura and Dakka. Their chiefs were the Khans of Lalpura and Pandiali.

• The Halimzai lived in the Gandab valley and in Kamali.

• The Baizai, "the most powerful clan", held the westernmost ground, bounded by the Kunar and Kabul rivers, and stretched into Afghanistan. Their chief was the Khan of Goshta.

• The Khwaezai lived from near Lalpura across the Bohai Dag towards Kamali.

The Kukozai, Dawezai and Utmanzai are affiliated clans on the northern edge, supposed to descend from Dawai, a second wife of Mohmand. [2] The handbook gives the plain Mohmands five main sections; the profile on this site names them, from Ibbetson, as Mayazai, Musazai, Dawezai, Matanni and Sarganni. [2] It put the tribe's fighting strength at about 19,000 men, nearly half of them Baizai. [2] The Gazetteer says 18,000. [3]

The handbook thought the hill Mohmands' constitution more aristocratic than their Yusufzai neighbours' and the power of their khans more developed. [2] The Gazetteer says the Khans of Lalpura owed allegiance in turn to Akbar, Shah Jahan, Nadir Shah and Ahmad Shah Durrani, and that about 1782 Arsala Khan of Lalpura rebelled against Timur Shah, submitted, and was executed at Peshawar in 1791. [3] Sana Haroon, a historian of the frontier, adds that the Afghan amirs treated the Khan of Lalpura as the head of a small state, with a quarter of the tolls on the Khyber, and meddled in who held the title. [7]

An anthropologist among the Mohmand

Akbar S. Ahmed's Pukhtun Economy and Society (1980) rests on fieldwork among the Mohmand. The publisher's summary says he builds an ideal model of Pukhtun society from the Pukhtun code, with historical and literary sources, and asks how the model is kept or changed. His argument is that the ideal holds best where contact with state systems is smallest and the land poorest, and he sets the poor tribal agencies on the Afghan border against the settled districts, where Pukhtun society departs further from its ideals. [8] The chapters cover Mohmand ecology and administration, lineage and leadership, non-Pukhtun clients, the Pukhto paradigm, settlement and domestic structure, and economic development. [8]

The colonial handbooks above count fighting men and the reach of the khans. Ahmed, writing a Pakistani anthropologist's account after independence, makes the Mohmand the test of a model of how Pukhtun society works.

The rising of 1897

Mohmand fighting with British columns did not begin in 1897. An 1898 account compiled from the Pioneer newspaper's war correspondence notes that at Shabqadar in 1852 Sir Colin Campbell with 600 men beat 6,000 Mohmands, and that in January 1864 Colonel Macdonnel with 1,750 men beat 5,000 on the same low hills facing the fort. [5] The Gazetteer says that in 1895 the Mohmands joined the resistance to the Chitral relief force and that in 1897 they were among the first to raise the standard of jihad. [3] Both are British claims about the tribe.

The Pioneer account says that about four in the afternoon of Saturday 7 August 1897, four or five thousand Mohmands crossed the border near Shabqadar fort, 18 miles north of Peshawar, burned the bazaar of Shankargarh and attacked a post held by forty or fifty Border Police, who fired on them. [5] Winston Churchill, then a war correspondent with the Malakand Field Force, gives the crossing as 8 August and the number as nearly 6,000. [6] The Pioneer says the men came down the Bohai valley, over the Nahaki pass and into Gandab, that the Northern and Western Mohmands had been stirred, and that the organiser was the Hadda Mulla, Najmuddin. [5] For the man himself, see the Hadda Mulla.

On the morning of 9 August Lieutenant-Colonel Woon, with about 750 men, met a Mohmand force that Churchill puts at 6,000. Brigadier-General Elles brought up two squadrons of the 13th Bengal Lancers, who charged along a dry riverbed, and Churchill says the lancers speared sixty. The Mohmands withdrew across the border. [6] Two brigades marched into the Mohmand country from Bajaur under Sir Bindon Blood and two from Shabqadar under Elles. [3] Churchill wrote that at Nawagai the Hadda Mulla had gathered about 1,000 men to oppose the advance. [6]

The Durand Line and the allowances

The Gazetteer says the Utmanzai, Dawezai, Halimzai, Tarakzai and Pindiali Mohmands came under the sole control of the British government in 1896 and received allowances from then. [3] In 1893 Mortimer Durand and Amir Abdur Rahman agreed a boundary which Haroon says kept Lalpura in Afghanistan, because it raised revenue for the Amir, and cut the Amir's ties with the Mohmand clans east of it. Abdur Rahman asserted his right to the whole Mohmand tract in 1895. In 1905 Amir Habibullah gave up the claim but kept the Bohai Dag valley. [7]

Allowances made a line inside the tribe as well. Haroon says that in May 1908 the Sufi Sahib of Butkhak, a follower of the Hadda Mulla, raised a lashkar of 5,000 Mohmands, 2,000 of them from the Afghan side, against Shabqadar. The British met it with 2,600 soldiers from a field force of almost 13,000. Haroon calls it the last major movement by the Hadda Mulla's contemporaries and direct accomplices, and reads the effort as one by the Hadda Mulla's followers to be recognised by the new order of the tribal areas and given allowances in their own right. [7]

The Haji Sahib, the blockade and the bombing

The Haji Sahib of Turangzai moved to Lakarai among the Safi Mohmand in 1915; his life is in his own article. Haroon's account of 1926 and 1927 shows what the allowance system had done. The Haji had got Afghan allowances for select Mohmand clans after their help to Amanullah in the Khost rebellion, on the maliks' promise never to take British money again. Soon the Halimzai, Musa Khel, Utmanzai and Dawezai, whose old allowances had been withdrawn after 1919, offered the Deputy Commissioner at Peshawar khassadars and loyalty, and he approved more than 15,000 rupees for the Halimzai, 12,000 for the Musa Khel, nearly 2,000 for the Utmanzai and 3,500 for the Dawezai. [7] The Haji raised a lashkar of his own shaikhs and the Safi and Mitai Musa Khel, which burned and looted the houses of the maliks who had broken their oath. [7]

The officer sent to report, Khan Bahadur Kuli Khan, wrote that the influence of the mullas had "developed from a religious to an authoritarian one" and that they could "coerce any Mohmand". Allowance-holding clans were told to deposit 25,000 rupees each with the political officer at Shabqadar, forfeit if they joined a lashkar led by a mulla. Haroon says the allowance-holders then formed a barrier between the Haji's lashkar and the administered districts. [7]

Bacha Khan's autobiography says that after British troops fired on a meeting at Utmanzai the people of the agencies "were boiling with rage". The Mohmands, Safis, Utmankhel, Mamunds and Salarzai attacked Shabqadar and other places, and the tribes approached the British through jirgas and demanded the release of Gandhi and of Bacha Khan, the release of the Red Shirts, and an end to oppression of the Pathans. [1] In March 1932, Haroon says, a lashkar of 500 upper Mohmands and Safis went out to punish allowance-holders who had refused passage to a party of upper Mohmands through Gandab. The Chief Commissioner was authorised to bomb villages after a warning, and in 1935 the Royal Air Force dropped bombs near the Gandab road to scatter a Mohmand lashkar. [7]

Poets of the plain

Raverty wrote in 1862 that Abd-ur-Rahman belonged to the Ghoria Khel clan of the Mohmand tribe and lived at Hazarkhani, in the tappa of the Mohmands, and that he was "a man of considerable learning" who lived as a dervish. [4] His grave at Hazarkhwani and the bombing of 2009 are told in Rahman Baba. Abd-ul-Hamid, Hamid Baba, was born at Mashokhel, a small village of the Kudrizi clan, so that, in Raverty's words, "Hamid, like Rahman, was a Mohmand, but of a different clan". [4] Hamid Baba gives the dates, which differ in Raverty's two books.

The Peshawar poet and lexicographer Qalandar Momand (1930–2003) carried the name Momand; his life is in his own article. The war on the Khyber in 1672 also had a Mohmand leader, on the Afghan telling that names Aimal Khan a Mohmand of the Khwaezai: see Aimal Khan and Darya Khan.

Since 1947

Haroon says that on 22 October 1947 some thousands of Mahsuds, Mohmands and Afridis moved into Kashmir, and that Badshah Gul II, a mulla of the Hadda Mulla's line, led a lashkar of Mohmands through Peshawar into Kashmir. [7] Mohmand became an agency in 1951; Asad Munir, writing in the Express Tribune, says that until 1973 only 30 per cent of the area was open to the administration, and that during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan the tribes did not allow the army or civil administration into the Baizai and Khwaezai border areas. [10] Haroon places a jirga of Mohmand, Afridi, Wazir and Yusufzai clans calling for an assault on Kabul to remove the Soviets in the first months of 1979, and puts the Mujahidin artillery of the Kunar-Mohmand-Bajaur region on the Pakistani side of the border. [7] Under the Taliban government in Kabul, she says, Taliban officials attended a jirga in Mohmand at which Pakistan-side Mohmands committed to a road across the disputed border. [7]

In July 2007, Munir writes, more than 200 militants stormed the shrine of the Haji Sahib of Turangzai in Lakaro and renamed the mosque beside it "Lal Masjid". He adds that local tribesmen later raised lashkars in support of the Frontier Corps. [10] Dawn reported on 14 November 2008 that security forces with helicopters and tanks had begun an operation around Charsadda and Peshawar as part of a plan to establish the government's writ in the agency, and that helicopters hit villages in Yaka Ghund and Lakaro. Officials said 21 militants died, local people said seven militants and six civilians. People in Shabqadar said they had been told to leave within 30 minutes, and a boat carrying 40 displaced people capsized. [11] About 9,000 families were moved to Jalozai camp during the 2009 operation. In June 2011 about 8,000 went home, and 313 more left the camp on 24 November. [12]

Two days later, on 26 November 2011, NATO helicopters attacked the Salala checkpoint in Baizai tehsil of Mohmand Agency, on the Kunar border. The Express Tribune counted at least 24 Pakistani soldiers killed and the Associated Press 25. Pakistan answered by closing the Torkham crossing to NATO supplies. [13, 14]

The Mohmand Dam and the royalty question

The Mohmand Dam is on the Swat river in Mohmand District. WAPDA, Pakistan's water authority, describes a concrete-faced rockfill dam 213 metres high, the fifth highest of its type, storing 1.29 million acre-feet, with 800 MW of power and 300 million gallons a day for Peshawar. Its report of 19 January 2026 puts progress at about 50 per cent and electricity at early 2028. [15] The contractor is China Gezhouba Group. [23]

Payment for the land is in dispute. In July 2021 a jirga of those affected told the Peshawar Press Club they had given their land cheaply "with a national zeal" and that the government had not kept the agreement: compensation for minerals and forests, jobs, contracts for local contractors. [16] In March 2024 elders of the Essakhel, Burhankhel, Uthmankhel and Mullagori, who share the tribal district, held a sit-in outside the dam and said the mountains had been grazing for their cattle and, for the Burhankhel, a source of building stone. [17] On 24 February 2026 a jirga of the Stanadar Qaumi Ittehad raised royalties with the governor. [18]

An older case runs the same way. In October 2018 Tarakzai and Malagori elders said an agreement with the Ayub Khan government gave 50 per cent of the Warsak Dam royalty to the Tarakzai, 40 per cent to the Malagori and 10 per cent to the Khalil Momand, and that it had never been paid. [19]

The merger of 2018

On 31 May 2018 President Mamnoon Hussain signed the 25th Amendment, which made the seven tribal agencies, Mohmand among them, districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and ended the Frontier Crimes Regulation. [20] In January 2019 the Election Commission gave Mohmand two general seats in the provincial assembly. [21] In the 2023 delimitation, which cut the ex-tribal seats in the National Assembly from 12 to six, Mohmand kept its one. [22]