Teega: the truce stone and how feuds are paused

At a glance

• A teega is a truce with written or spoken terms, made by a jirga between two feuding sides for a fixed time. Akbar S. Ahmed translates the word as "stone", and the jirga's closing words are "the stone has been placed". [3]

• It differs from a solla, a short pause that stops the shooting and keeps each side in its own ground. A teega has clauses, a period and a fine for each breach. [3]

• The terms Ahmed printed from 1940 ran for fifteen years and priced every killing, wound, house and theft. The Kurram agreement of July 2023 states in one clause that the "taega" is placed for one year. [1, 3]

• A teega does not end a feud. The feud ends by settlement (rogha), forgiveness or nanawatai, and the teega gives the time for that to be arranged. [3, 4]

• Enforcement comes from sureties held by the jirga, fines, burnt houses and the loss of the jirga's protection. The state has fined breaches too, and in 2018 it abolished the Frontier Crimes Regulation under which it did so. [3–6]

What the word means

Teega is the spelling Ahmed uses in his study of the Mohmand, where he defines it as the formal agreement made in a case of rogha, a settlement, and glosses it as "literally stone". He adds that once the terms are agreed, the whole gathering prays for peace and declares that "the stone has been placed" (teega kekhodal). His glossary lists a second word, kanrai, also "lit. stone", for truce terms. [3] The High Court advocate Hakam Shah, in an essay on the jirga, writes the word as teega too and says it is "symbolized with marking of a stone". [4] A 2023 agreement from Kurram spells it "taega". [1]

Ahmed traces the custom to an "ancient Rajput custom" in which the details of a dispute were recorded on a stone set between the disputed areas, citing a 1900 work by King. He does not say whether a stone is set up among the Mohmand today. [3] Another sign of the practice is in Enriquez's account of the Adam Khel Afridi in 1908. When the tribe agreed a twelve-month armistice, a sulah, they "set up pillars to witness" it. Enriquez, a British officer writing in 1910, does not call it a teega, and Ahmed does not link the word to the pillars. [2]

The truce is not only for feuds between men. Hakam Shah describes a teega that a community declares alone, as when a community bans firing guns in the air at festivals, and he says a violation of any teega is both fined and shameful, because the violator is "charged for nonconformity to their words". [4]

How a jirga makes one

A teega comes at the end of work the jirga has already done. Ahmed names three ways a jirga can take a case: the learned (alim) decide by the Quran and sharia, a jirga of equal numbers from both sides decides by Pukhto lar, "the path of Pukhto", or the two sides give wak (authority) to a jirga or to the Political Agent to decide as they see fit. [3] Giving wak is a pledge to accept the answer. Mohammed Osman Tariq, working in south-east Afghanistan in 2008, writes that a decision reached on wak "is irrevocable and all parties have to obey it". [5]

Ahmed watched the whole sequence in May 1977, when he was the government's Political Agent in Orakzai and a fight broke out between the A'Khel and the Rabia Khel. The shooting stopped first. He then sent fifty or sixty elders and religious leaders from both factions into the disputed ground as a jirga, and they argued for six days. Both sides gave wak for three months. Anyone who broke the peace in that time would pay a fine of Rs 50,000 or lose property, and the clans handed ten .303 rifles to the jirga elders as security. A teega was drawn up. [3] Ahmed also saw what held the factions to the table: feeding the jirga and its visitors cost the A'Khel cows and sheep twice a day, and their Ali Khel allies ate twenty to thirty cows a day in one area alone. A dozen A'Khel maliks told him privately that a week more of the confrontation would ruin them. [3]

What the terms say

Ahmed prints one complete teega, translated from a handwritten copy kept by one of the parties. It was made on 26 July 1940 "at the political bungalow" between two Mohmand leaders of Gandab, Malik Abdullah Khan and Malik Shahzada Khan, and ran to 25 July 1955. [3] The first clause is the promise to keep the solla until the period ends. The penalties that follow are fixed and divided, half to the government and half to the injured side. [3]

• Killing a mashar, a man of standing, cost Rs 5,000, and killing a kashar, a man of little standing, Rs 2,500.

• A wound with a sharp weapon or rifle cost half those sums, and a blow with a blunt weapon Rs 100 or Rs 50.

• A killing at night was decided by oath: the complainant chose ten men to swear on the Quran to the accused's innocence, and if they would not swear the killer paid.

• Attacking a village cost Rs 5,000 and attacking a tower Rs 500. Hiring an assassin, sheltering the other side's deserters (Rs 1,000) and stealing cattle (twice the value, decided by oath, one oath-taker for each animal) were each named and priced.

• New building was limited to rooms within a hundred paces of the village, with a fine of Rs 500 and demolition for more. Each side promised not to close the other's paths.

• Civil disputes were to be settled by the sharia during the period.

• A fine unpaid by the culprit was taken from his relatives and then from the property of the whole village, whose people were "held responsible jointly or severally".

• The two leaders themselves, and their sons, uncles and cousins, carried higher fines: Rs 10,000 for killing either leader and Rs 5,000 for a close kinsman.

Ahmed's comment is dry. Little more than lip service was paid to clauses such as the rebuilding of villages burnt in the feud, which "until today remain incomplete", and the deed was broken before 1955. [3] Yet the Shati Khel feud between 1933 and 1940 had killed twenty-nine people in the one settlement, and the 1940 teega was followed, in Ahmed's words, "by a period of relative calm", partly because both groups had lost their leaders and needed time to regroup. [3] A teega, then, buys time. An earlier truce in the same feud, made in 1928 with Abdullah for twelve years, had also forbidden new building, under a fine of Rs 500 and demolition. [3]

Sureties and guarantors

A jirga does not rely on goodwill. Tariq describes machalga in Loya Paktia: once both sides have given wak, each is asked for a surety. It may be rifles, cash or ornaments, and the jirga will not sit unless it is given. The side that refuses the verdict forfeits it, and both sides first promise aloud not to ask for it back. [5] Hakam Shah describes the same practice for rifles, which the jirga holds as a bond or guarantee he spells gravey. [4] The Orakzai teega Ahmed saw made in 1977 followed the same pattern, with the ten rifles. [3]

The community is the second guarantee. In the 1940 deed the village answers for its member's fine. Hakam Shah lists the penalties for refusing a jirga's order: excommunication, confiscated rifles, heavy fines, and men sent to burn the house. A man who defies it all is called kabarjan, "the arrogant one", and loses the protection the jirga promised, so that his opponents may kill him without consequence. [4] The Adam Khel truce of 1908 shows the sequence. When one man shot an enemy in breach, the Jowaki jirga of six hundred elders arrived and lodged with him. They refused to do any business for a week while he fed them, then burnt his house and property and fined him 2,000 rupees. They gave 1,000 to the dead man's relatives and divided the rest among themselves. [2]

Baramta is a different thing: Ahmed defines it as the recovery of stolen goods by joint tribal action, one of the words he found almost forgotten among the Mohmand of Bela by the 1970s. [3] The 1940 teega's clause on cattle theft covers the same ground as a clause, not as a separate institution.

A truce and a settlement are different steps

Hakam Shah writes that an enmity can be concluded only through rogha, "a healthy agreement", and that Pashto has no everyday word for a "decision", since the word in use, faisala, is Arabic. [4] Ahmed's note separates the steps: solla stops the shooting, the teega is the formal agreement, with clauses and a period, in cases of rogha. [3] Ending a feud for good then means nanawatai, a plea for pardon that Hakam Shah describes as a goat, a laid-down headdress or a weapon handed over, [4] and the compensation and marriage settlements set out in the article on badal. Hakam Shah names swara, a girl given in marriage to the offended family, among the practices that human-rights critics condemn. [4] A teega itself requires none of this, and none of the terms Ahmed prints involves a girl.

Truces in Kurram, Waziristan and Bajaur

The Kurram valley has long had truces. Enriquez, in his 1910 book, writes that a quarrel over springs between the Turi and the Khostwal across the border had killed six Afghans and one Turi, and that "a truce was proclaimed in Jirga, to last for two years, but it has already been violated again". [2]

The fullest modern text is the Kurram agreement of 14 July 2023, which the peace-agreements database PA-X records. A grand jirga of elders from Kohat, Hangu and Orakzai, set up by the Kohat commissioner, brought the two sides to terms. Clause 3 reads: "the 'taega' has been placed between the fighting parties for one year." Fighting posts were to be emptied under the jirga's watch and handed to the police, roads opened, and anyone who sheltered an accused man treated as accused. Clause 6 set a fine of 120 million rupees on a violator, confiscated in the name of the government and the jirga members, with a court prosecution as well. [1] This is the pattern of 1940 at a larger scale: a period, a stated penalty and a split between the state and the jirga.

Press reports of the later Kurram agreements do not use the word. A 14-point accord, endorsed by a grand jirga in Kohat and announced on 1 January 2025, required a permanent ceasefire, the surrender of arms and the demolition of bunkers. It fined the village or area Rs 10 million for violence and set a land commission to settle disputes over ten named areas. [7] A jirga then agreed an eight-month peace in March 2025 at Qila Abbas Alamdar in Lower Kurram, with violations to be dealt with under the Kohat agreement. [8] In July 2025, elders from more than two dozen Kurram villages, with the deputy commissioner in the chair at Sadda, declared a one-year peace. [9]

In South Waziristan in August 2019, a jirga of the Waziri Dotani and the Mehsud Ahmedzai agreed a truce over land that had been set aside for public use, a school or a hospital. Armed elders were asked to leave the trenches and heavy and light weapons to be taken off the posts. It was given ten days to judge the land. [10] In November 2020, in Mir Ali in North Waziristan, the Khaddi (Dawar) and the Machi Khel (Wazir) took up heavy weapons over more than 1,000 hectares, a dispute almost a century old. Pashtun Tahafuz Movement activists marched on the trenches on 19 November 2020 to force a brief ceasefire. It did not hold. Abubakar Siddique and Umar Daraz Wazir reported that the district police chief's written ban on carrying weapons followed on 22 November. [11]

In Bajaur in August 2025, the 50-member Amn Jirga talked with leaders of the Pakistani Taliban for seven hours and a ceasefire "until the conflict was completely resolved through talks" was reported. [12] In May 2026 about thirty elders from Bajaur and Kunar met near the Nawa Pass and agreed a five-point ceasefire, with a joint jirga to review it after three months. [13] Press reports of these agreements do not use the word teega or name a guarantor, but the method is the same: elders step in between armed sides and agree a stop, a period and a review.

How the state and the courts deal with it

The state has both used the teega and tried to replace it. Ahmed records a teega signed in 1973 between the Mohmand Political Agent and the clans, which made a one-mile circle around the Agency headquarters at Ekka Ghund protected ground. On 25 June 1973 Saida Jan shot his cousin dead inside it. The Political Agent referred the case to a council of elders under the Frontier Crimes Regulation and sentenced Saida Jan to fourteen years and a fine of Rs 50,000, partly for breaking the teega. The Commissioner of Peshawar raised the fine to Rs 100,000, and Ahmed found that the mercy petitions had reached Islamabad without answer when he left in August 1977. [3] The case shows the state treating a tribal teega as a bond between clans and itself, with the state collecting.

Ahmed saw too that the teega depends on the strength of the mashars. By the 1970s, in the village of Bela, a ruling could not be enforced once someone went to the police, and the young had almost forgotten teega, badragga (tribal escort) and baramta. [3] In Pakistan's tribal areas the Frontier Crimes Regulation was abolished in 2018. The European Union Agency for Asylum wrote in 2026 that the jirgas there "were officially abolished in 2018" but "continue to operate in some of these areas where formal courts have difficulties exercising their authority". [6] The Supreme Court of Pakistan, in a judgment of 16 January 2019 quoted by I. A. Rehman in Dawn, found that jirgas deciding civil or criminal cases do not work under the Constitution or any law, and that they may act as arbitration, mediation or reconciliation forums in civil disputes if the parties consent. [14] From December 2019 a Khyber Pakhtunkhwa law set up government reconciliation committees of up to forty members in each tribal district. Malik Qabil Mehsud, a South Waziristan elder, told Arab News in 2020 that it gave district administrators the final say: "We want the old open-ended jirgas in which all and sundry can participate." [15]

A truce between armed sides in the present day is therefore usually made under the eyes of the deputy commissioner, with the police and the army present, and it is written down with penalties payable to the government. The 2023 and 2025 Kurram agreements are of that kind. [1, 7, 9] What they keep from the older form is the jirga that brings the sides together, the fixed period, the fine, and the community answering for its own.