Shia Pashtuns: the Turi, Bangash and Orakzai, and their neighbours

At a glance

• Nearly all Pashtuns are Hanafi Sunni Muslims. The Shia are a small minority, living mostly in three places: Upper Kurram, the Kohat and Hangu country, and Orakzai Tirah. [1, 5, 9]

• The Turi of Kurram, around Parachinar, are the only Pashtun tribe that is wholly Shia. The Bangash and the Orakzai are divided: some clans Shia, some Sunni. [5]

• In 1901 the Imperial Gazetteer counted fewer than one Muslim in a hundred in the North-West Frontier Province as Shia. [1] Around 2009 Abou Zahab put the Shia share of Kurram at about 40 per cent and of the Orakzai at 10 to 15 per cent. [5] Pakistan's census does not record sect. [11]

• The Shia of Parachinar and the Sunni of Sadda and Boshehra lived side by side for generations, under one customary law and one political agent. Fighting between them has been serious since the 1980s and has closed the road to Parachinar more than once, most recently after the convoy attack of 21 November 2024. [1, 5, 11–13]

• In Afghanistan the Shia are described as Hazara, Qizilbash and Sadat, not as a Pashtun tribe. [4, 6, 7]

Sunni or Shia: the plain answer

Pashtuns are overwhelmingly Sunni. The Library of Congress country study of Afghanistan says the Pashtun are "generally Hanafi Sunni Muslims, but some are Ithna Asharia Shia". [9] Mountstuart Elphinstone, the East India Company's envoy to Kabul, wrote in his Account of the Kingdom of Caubul that the Shia sect "is confined to the Persians and their descendants; all the other Mahometans being Soonnees". [4] Later British writers found Shia among the Turi, the Bangash and the Orakzai. [1, 2]

The Imperial Gazetteer of the North-West Frontier Province, a British compilation of 1908, counted 92 per cent of the 1901 population as Muslim and said that less than one per cent of the Muslims confessed Shia tenets. It named "the Turis and some of the Bangash tribes in Kurram", "many of the Orakzai Pathans in Tirah", and added that the sect "is also found in Kohat and the Shirani country". [1] That is still the shape of it. A Shia Pashtun belongs to a handful of tribes in one corner of the Pashtun lands.

Beyond that, no one has a figure for the whole people. Pakistan's census does not record sect. [11] Pew's 2009 estimates are for countries: 10 to 15 per cent of Pakistan's Muslims and 10 to 15 per cent of Afghanistan's, which include non-Pashtuns. [10] The numbers that exist are local:

• Turi: nearly 12,000 in the Kurram Agency in 1901, the largest tribe in it. [1]

• Kurram today: about 40 per cent Shia of about 500,000 people in Abou Zahab's 2009 estimate; roughly 42 per cent Shia and 58 per cent Sunni in the government reports Dawn cited in 2024, for a district of about 800,000. [5, 11] A writer in Zan Times put it at about half, with nearly 400,000 Shia. [16]

• Parachinar: about 80 per cent Shia, Turi and Shia Bangash, in a plan the FATA Secretariat commissioned for a town of about 187,000 in 2014. [8]

• Orakzai: 10 to 15 per cent Shia of the tribe, in Abou Zahab's estimate. [5]

The wider picture of belief and practice is in religion among Pashtuns.

The Turi of Kurram

The Turi (توري) hold the upper Kurram valley around Parachinar, below the Spin Ghar. They speak Pashto. The Gazetteer called them "a tribe of Turkish origin belonging to the Shiah sect" who "now rank as Pathans". [1] The writers it follows disagree about where they came from. The Khyber.org entry by Ishrat Hussain sets them out: one theory says Turkish, Mohammad Hayat Khan says Karlanri Afghan, Lumsden says Mughal, Edwards and others say Hindki. The Turi themselves say they came from Persia, wandered, and settled the head of the valley as a summer base, wintering their flocks down the Kurram to the Indus. [7]

Olaf Caroe, a British officer and administrator on the frontier who wrote The Pathans in 1958, gave the Turkmen theory its due and rejected it. The Turi sit in the middle of the Karlanri tribes, he wrote, and have nothing of Turkish appearance; their place in the Karlanri genealogy is a belief he thought well founded. [3] That is also how Pashtuns reckon them. They are Pashtun by language and custom, whatever their sect. One passage that Khyber.org reproduces says "No true Afghan, however, is a Shiah", the opinion of its colonial-era source; the same passage says the Turi are Pathans in "language, customs and habits (except their religion)". [7]

How they came to hold Upper Kurram is told as follows. The Turi were nomads, vassals of the Bangash, and about the beginning of the eighteenth century, "according to story", an insult to a Turi woman brought the quarrel to a head. They took Barki above Kharlachi, then Peiwar, and reached an arrangement with Shalozan and Zeran, the largest villages in the valley. [7] Abou Zahab says the Turi were under Bangash domination until the eighteenth century, when they attacked, made the Bangash hamsaya (dependants) and pushed them into Lower Kurram. [5] The valley's history under Afghan and British rule is in the Kurram valley.

The Gazetteer describes the Turi as living under their own customary law, Turizuna, unwritten but known to the maliks, who say what the custom is in a given case, with the Political Agent settling cases. Murder and violent crime, it says, were "not very common" in 1908. [1] The Turi asked the British to take over the valley in 1892. Caroe gives their reason as the plea that the only alternative was submission to Afghan rule. [3]

How the Turi became Shia

Nobody has a dated account. Two things are said.

The first is a Turi and Bangash story of conversion by joining. When the Turi conquered Upper Kurram, the Bangash of Shalozan and Zeran "on their embracing the Shia tenets were admitted into full brotherhood and equal rights with Turis". The Jalandharis and the Shargha Khels, who had crossed the hills into the Kurram watershed, also took the Shia faith and settled as the Turi's allies. [7] The same text is quoted in the plan for Parachinar, from a Parachinar history site. [8]

The second is a theory about the Roshaniyya, the movement of Pir Roshan. Raverty, writing in the nineteenth century, held that the "so-called Shia Bangash, Shia Orakzais, and Turis" were concealed remnants of the Roshani movement, which the Mughals had crushed. Caroe, who had dealt a great deal with Orakzai and Bangash Shias, said he never heard the identification made in public and thought that, if put, it would be denied. He did think the Roshanis had something to do with the beginnings of Shia sectarianism on the borders of Tirah, and that their descendants, forgetting where their beliefs began, had merged into the general Shia confession. [3] It is a theory by outsiders. The communities do not say it of themselves.

Bangash and Orakzai: Kohat, Hangu and Tirah

The Bangash are split. Abou Zahab says the clans of Lower Kurram are Sunni, while other Bangash clans are Shia, Sunni or mixed. [5] The Gazetteer lists only "some of the Bangash tribes in Kurram" as Shia and says the sect is found in Kohat. [1] In the Turi account the Bangash of Shalozan and Zeran took the Shia faith. [7] Abou Zahab records clashes in Hangu during Muharram and the bombing of a Shia community in Peshawar, mostly from Parachinar, in December 2008. [5]

The Orakzai are the better documented. H. C. Wylly, a British officer writing in 1912, described a tribe "partly Sunni and partly Shiah by persuasion, the Sunnis predominating", with "a long-standing and bitter animosity" between the communities. The four divisions of the Muhammad Khel, in the middle of the Mastura valley, were Shia and numbered, in his figures, 2,500 fighting men; the Sturi Khel were half Shia and half Sunni; the Ali Khel, who live among them as hamsaya, were part Shia. [2] The Orakzai also divide by the old frontier factions, Gar and Samil, and Wylly says the Muhammad Khel were Gar. [2] The tribe's wider history is in the Orakzai.

Wylly records two episodes from the Shia side. In 1894 the Bar Muhammad Khel asked, through the British political officer at Kohat, to come under British rule, saying they could not much longer defend themselves against their Sunni fellow-tribesmen, who had cut their arms supply through the influence of Sunni mullahs. The government of India refused. In 1903, he writes, "a fakir from Ghazni" preached jihad in the Orakzai country and made an organised attack on the Shia, and was twice defeated. [2] After the fighting the four Shia divisions of the Muhammad Khel asked again to come under British control, on the lines of the Kurram clans. [2]

The Orakzai quarrel of the 2000s was about a shrine. Abou Zahab says the Mir Anwar Shah shrine at Kalaya originally belonged to the Shia, was given to the Sunnis under British rule, and the Shia were later allowed to visit and keep it up. In 2000 the Taliban declared that arrangement un-Islamic and told the Shia to stay away. In October 2006 the shrine was reduced to rubble after a seven-day battle over its ownership. [5]

Shia Pashtuns in Afghanistan

Accounts of Afghanistan's Shia describe other peoples. The Khyber.org text, repeating its colonial source, says the Shia of Afghanistan "all belong to non-Afghan races such as the Hazarahs, Kizilbash, and Tajik". [7] Elphinstone described the Persian-speaking Qizilbash as Shia who lived among Sunnis and kept their faith with a degree of concealment. [4] Pew estimates 3 to 4 million Shia in Afghanistan, 10 to 15 per cent of its Muslims, and its table does not break them down by people. [10]

The clearest recent account is from Paktia, in the heart of the Pashtun country. Fabrizio Foschini of the Afghanistan Analysts Network wrote in 2018 about Khwajah Hassan, a village of perhaps a thousand families at Gardez, inhabited by Shia Sadat, descendants of the Prophet. They claim to have arrived from Sabzevar after the Islamic conquest, speak Dari as a first language though most are fluent in Pashto, and have lived among Pashtun and Tajik Sunnis with, residents told him, no conflict. [6] In the jihad against the Soviets a Sadat commander, Dr Ali Shah Musawi, joined a faction of traditional Sunni mullahs and not a Shia mujahideen party. [6] On 3 August 2018 gunmen attacked the village mosque during Friday prayers and killed more than thirty worshippers. The Islamic State claimed it. Sunnis from Gardez came to the funerals, stood guard at the burials and then posted themselves at Shia mosques and shrines as human shields. A Paktia analyst told AAN: "The only fortunate thing in all this is that Paktiawals joined together for the commemoration of the dead of Khwajah Hassan." [6] A resident told AAN that Haqqani fighters in the jihad years had harassed Shia and objected to their celebration of Ashura. [6]

Muharram, matam and the imambargahs

Muharram is the month in which Shia mourn Imam Husayn, grandson of the Prophet, and his companions, killed at Karbala. [17] The Gazetteer's remark that Kurram's revenue settlement included grants for "shrines, mosques, temples, and especially matam kotahs or Shiahs' mourning houses" shows these buildings were part of the valley in 1908. [1] It added that the Shia are "chiefly distinguished by the reverence they pay to Saiyids as descendants of Ali", while among Sunnis the mullas hold most influence, which is a British observer's summary. [1]

The plan for Parachinar describes a town in which religion "is at the core of the life of local population". It counts two large Imam Bargahs, four mosques, two Eid Gahs and seven graveyards, with a Central Mosque and Imam Bargah, a women's Imam Bargah (Zanana Imam Bargah) and a ziarat (shrine) in the old town, under a tall minaret. It adds that mosques, imambargahs and ziarats are all over the town and the villages around. [8] On the night of Ashura in 2021 the Associated Press of Pakistan reported more than 200 mourning processions from different imambargahs in Parachinar, with local volunteers working beside the police and people setting up free stalls of tea, milk and water for the mourners. [17]

Muharram has also been a time of danger. In 2008 passengers on the Kohat and Darra Adam Khel roads were stopped and told to take off their shirts so that Shia could be picked out by marks left on their backs by Muharram flagellation. [5] Abou Zahab says clashes in Kurram have come especially in Muharram and at Nowruz. [5]

Coexistence before 1979, and the argument over it

Elders and scholars Dawn's Zia Ur Rehman interviewed in 2024 say that for almost a century Sunni and Shia in Kurram lived together with occasional disputes over land, forests, water and religious events, and that this changed in 1979, with the Iranian revolution and the Soviet war in Afghanistan. [11] Dr Noreen Naseer of the University of Peshawar told him the events of 1979 brought "significant demographic and ideological shifts". [11] Abou Zahab dates sporadic communal violence to the 1930s. [5] The Gazetteer records the Turi fighting among themselves and with the Jaji and the Zaimusht in 1882 to 1884, and Caroe says that the Turi's Shia faith among Sunni neighbours gave such strife a sectarian hue. [1, 3] Taken together, the sources describe a long coexistence that was never free of quarrels and became much more violent after 1979.

Both sides still keep the customs that held it together. The Gazetteer records Turizuna in force in 1908, and the Murree agreement of October 2008 was signed by the elders and chiefs of the Turi and the Mangal. [1, 15] The agreement signed at Kohat in January 2025 draws on both: it binds both sides to uphold the Murree agreement of 2008, and asks local elders to protect teachers and other staff "in line with the Pashtun tradition of hospitality". [14] The jirga's own working is in the Pashtun council of elders.

The conflict, 1980s to 2025

The history of the valley and its road is in the Kurram valley. What is widely reported follows.

Violence began in Sadda in 1982, when Shia families were forced to leave: 68 in Asad Munir's count in the Express Tribune, "some 60" in Dawn's. [11, 15] A jirga in 1990 agreed to let them return, and the decision has not been carried out. [11, 15] In 1986 the Turi stopped Afghan mujahideen crossing their land into Afghanistan, and Abou Zahab says General Zia ul-Haq allowed a "purge" of the Turi by the mujahideen with local Sunnis. [5] Allama Arif Hussain al-Hussaini, a cleric of Pewar, trained at Najaf and Qom and Khomeini's representative in Pakistan from 1985, was killed in 1988, and the Turi held Zia responsible. [5, 11] In 1996 more than 200 people died. [5, 11]

In April 2007 the worst fighting began. Abou Zahab counts 215 dead after a procession in Parachinar was fired on; Asad Munir, writing in 2010, counted 40 villages destroyed, about 2,060 houses burned, more than 2,300 families displaced and 95 places of worship attacked across April and November 2007. [5, 15] The Thal to Parachinar road was closed to Shia, and the Shia in retaliation stopped Sunnis of Upper Kurram from travelling on the Parachinar road. [15] The Murree agreement of October 2008 and a peace deal of February 2011 followed. [11, 15]

Each community tells it differently.

• Shia voices. Niyaz Ahmed Karbalai, an elder of Parachinar, recalls that Sunni Afghan refugees from Logar, Paktika and Khost settled on Shia communal land in the 1980s as hamsaya. Mukhtar Hussain, a driver, says the Taliban's brutality "united the Shia tribesmen". Naseer says that when the refugees left, Sunnis began occupying Turi land: "The Turis are defending their own land, not encroaching on others' territories." Dawn writes that after the expulsions of 1982 the Shia tribes resolved together not to sell their land to Sunnis. [11]

• Sunni voices. Khaliq Dad, a Sunni activist from Kurram, says "unspeakable acts of violence occurred" on both sides, "including the desecration of corpses and beheadings", and that these made reconciliation "nearly impossible". [11] Dawn's account says Sunnis in Boshehra and Mata Sangar in Upper Kurram had long been besieged by Shia tribes, and that Sunni tribes have criticised Shia young men who fought in Syria with the Zainabiyoun Brigade, which Pakistan banned in April 2024. The Shia community denies taking part in the Syrian war; elders and publications acknowledge that some young men fought and died there. [11] Writing in Zan Times, an Afghan researcher records that the Turi accuse Sunni tribes of land encroachment, while Sunni tribes say the British settled land cases in the early twentieth century in the Turi's favour. [16]

• Researchers. Sibth ul Hassan Turi, who studies land disputes in Kurram for his doctorate, says disputes over land, forests, water and mountains "often exacerbate tensions more significantly than religious provocations". [11]

The convoy attack of 21 November 2024 is the most reported event. About 200 vehicles carrying Shia passengers from Parachinar to Peshawar came under fire in Lower Kurram. Dawn first reported 39 dead and then 43, and its later feature put the toll at 49. [11–13] Officials attributed it to a land dispute; Dawn's reporting records conflicting accounts of the motive and the Majlis-e-Wahdat-e-Muslimeen accused the police of negligence. [12, 13] Aurangzaib Khan, in a Dawn commentary, called the official description of "two groups" wrong and said locals blamed a "hidden hand" of militants, adding that "it is a Pakhtun head that is harvested in this saga of beheadings, no matter what sect." [18]

Among Pashtuns the talk of unity is also recorded. In October 2024 Manzoor Pashteen of the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement stressed the need for Shia-Sunni unity at a gathering in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. [16] In the February 2024 elections Hameed Hussain, a Shia candidate, won the new seat covering Upper and Lower Kurram with substantial Sunni support from Lower Kurram. [11] The agreement of 1 January 2025 set a permanent ceasefire, a ban on displaying weapons and a land commission, and committed both sides to protect those seeking shelter and not to dishonour women or desecrate bodies. [14]