Tirah and the Bara valley: Afridi and Orakzai highlands

At a glance

• Tirah (تیراه, Tīrāh) is the mountain country south of the Khyber, between the Safed Koh (the Spin Ghar) and the Kohat road. Afridi hold its Rajgal, Maidan and Waran valleys and Orakzai its upper Mastura, Khanki and Kharmana valleys. [1]

• The Bara river rises in Tirah and runs east to Peshawar, where its water supplies the city. Bara town, a few miles south-west of Peshawar, sits where the river leaves the hills. [1, 7]

• Pir Roshan moved his headquarters to Tirah in the sixteenth century, and the Roshaniyya fought the Mughals from it for the next hundred years. [1, 3]

• In 1897 Afridi and Orakzai rose against British forts on the Khyber and the Samana. A British army of about 30,000 to 34,500 men invaded Tirah in October, the first foreign army to cross it, and left in the spring of 1898. [1, 2]

• Since the 2000s Tirah's people have been displaced several times, by militants and by army operations. Between November 2025 and January 2026 tens of thousands of families left for Bara and Peshawar, and in September 2026 the district administration set 10 October for their return. [12, 14, 22]

The valleys and the river

The Imperial Gazetteer of 1908, a British compilation, places Tirah between 33° 37' and 34° N and 70° 30' and 71° 15' E. [1] Three rivers, the Mastura, the Khanki Toi and the Kharmana, rise within a few miles of Mittughar, a 12,470-foot point on the Safed Koh. There the range splits into branches, and between them lie the valleys. The Gazetteer names Rajgal, Maidan and Waran as the Afridi valleys, and the upper Mastura, Khanki and Kharmana as Orakzai. [1]

The valley floors lie 5,000 to 7,000 feet up. They are buried in snow in winter and give plenty of pasture in summer, and the Gazetteer calls the winter intensely cold except in the lower Bara, lower Mastura and Khanki valleys. [1] The Afridi move down to the Khyber, Bazar and Kajuri in winter. The Gazetteer says the high country is occupied "in the summer months" by all the Orakzai sections, two sections of the Jowaki Afridi and a section of the Adam Khel Afridi. [1] A Tribune report of January 2026 put the population at 111,000 to 124,000 in seven union councils. [22]

The Bara is the valley's own river. It rises in the Tirah highlands and runs east between the Safed Koh and its spur the Surghar on the north and the Torghar on the south, which divides it from the Mastura. [1] In Tirah the Gazetteer finds it confined between "lofty, rugged, and pine-clad ranges" and "thickly dotted with fortified homesteads". [1] It enters the Peshawar plain near Fort Bara, a few miles south-west of the city, and falls into the Kabul river after about 100 miles. Peshawar's water supply is drawn from it through a masonry flume two miles above the fort. After rain in the hills it brings down a reddish silt that the Gazetteer calls extremely fertilising. [1] The 2023 census report names Tirah as its source. [7]

The Khyber Pass is in its own article, and the Kohat side is in Kohat.

The Roshaniyya's stronghold

Tirah was where Bayazid Ansari, Pir Roshan, took his movement when the followers of Pir Baba in Buner and Akhund Darweza opposed it among the Yusufzai. Olaf Caroe, a British administrator who wrote on the Pashtuns in 1958, says Afridi, Orakzai, Khalil, Mohmand and Bangash "flocked to his standard" there. [3] The Gazetteer adds that the earlier inhabitants, the Tirahis, "probably a Tajik race", were driven out by the Pir-i-Roshan and that a remnant fled to Nangrahar. The Orakzai have their own account of the Tirahis, given in their article. [1]

The Mughals came into Tirah more than once. The Gazetteer records that about 1619 or 1620 the governor of Kabul, Mahabat Khan, "treacherously massacred" 300 Orakzai of the Daulatzai who had joined the Roshaniyya. Ghairat Khan's army then advanced to the foot of the Sampagha pass, held by the Roshanis under Ihdad and the Daulatzai under Malik Tor, and was driven back with heavy loss. About six years later Ihdad was shot and his head sent to Jahangir. After Jahangir's death in 1627 his son Abdul Qadir attacked Peshawar and besieged its citadel, and the Orakzai and Afridi fell on the governor's column on the road to Kabul. [1] See Pashtuns and the Mughal frontier.

Caroe writes that the sect itself died, but that in Tirah it left champions, Azar Mir an Orakzai and Yusuf an Afridi, "so valiant a swordsman that his deeds are acclaimed in ballads sung today", and that the Afridi hold on the freedom of Tirah "is a tradition, still living, which the sect had done much to inspire". [3] The Gazetteer says that after the Mughal empire decayed Tirah was "virtually independent", at times owning a nominal allegiance to Kabul. [1]

Why Afridi and Orakzai rose in 1897

The risings of 1897 began in the Tochi in June, spread to Swat and Malakand in July and the Mohmand country in August (see the Hadda Mulla), and reached Tirah in the same month. [3] In Tirah the Gazetteer names Mulla Sayyid Akbar, an Aka Khel Afridi, as the preacher at whose bidding the clans reconciled their feuds and gathered for jihad. [1]

The Afridi gave their reasons in their own words. On 7 September 1897, 18 maliks, ulama and elders took a petition to the Amir at Kabul, which the British later printed in translation. It says the British government had "erected forts at various points within our borders", that the Afridi had complained to the Afghan government many times without an answer, and that "being helpless, and having regard to Islam", they had "opened the door of jehad". They had destroyed forts on the Samana, at Shinawari and on the Ublan pass, and meant to destroy the rest. Then: "We will never consent to tender our allegiance to the British Government, and become their subjects." They offered their allegiance to "the King of Islam" instead. [2]

Amir Abdur Rahman, whose Durand Line agreement of 1893 had put Tirah on the British side, refused. On 23 September he replied that they had said nothing when he rode to Rawalpindi through the Khyber or when Durand's mission passed, and that "silence indicates consent". [2] The deputation was held at Jalalabad. [2] A letter from the Mulla of Hadda to the Afridi and Orakzai mullahs, found later in Sayyid Akbar's house, said the time and day of fighting had to be fixed together. [2] See Abdur Rahman Khan.

The British government called the risings unprovoked, and its Gazetteer says the Khyber and Samana attacks "necessitated" the invasion. [1] The tribes had been paid since 1879 to hold the Khyber, and the Khyber Rifles' British officers had been withdrawn before the posts fell, on 23 and 24 August by the Gazetteer's dates. [1] Sultan-i-Rome has the Afridi take Ali Masjid and Fort Maude on 23 August and the gate of Landi Kotal opened on 25 August, and Javed Iqbal also dates the fall of Landi Kotal to the 25th; the rising of 1897 tells it in full. [5, 6] By the end of August, the Gazetteer counts 15,000 Orakzai and Afridi round the Samana posts. Saragarhi fell on 12 September, and Fort Lockhart and Fort Gulistan were relieved on the 14th. [1]

The invasion of Tirah, October 1897 to April 1898

The army that came was in two divisions under Sir William Lockhart, with columns at Peshawar and in Kurram. [1] The Gazetteer gives its strength as 34,500 men in one place and about 30,000 in another. [1] It started from the Miranzai valley on 18 October and went over the Chagru Kotal, under the cliffs of Dargai. [1]

Dargai was fought twice. A British officer writing letters to The Times, Colonel H. D. Hutchinson, says the first action on 18 October drove off the Orakzai Ali Khel who held the village, burned it and withdrew, and that "the ardour of the tribesmen was not at all quenched". Afridi maliks from Khangarbur and Ramadan reinforced them, and the heights had to be stormed again on 20 October. [2] The Gazetteer dates it the 21st and counts British losses of 38 killed and 191 wounded. [1]

From Dargai the army crossed the Khanki and Mastura valleys by the Sampagha and Arhanga passes into Maidan and Bara. [1] There it burned. Hutchinson writes that Lockhart had first ordered houses spared, then decided "not to allow the Zakka-khels any more law", and that "all their fortified houses in Maidan" were "to be burned and levelled to the ground". [2] Around the Maidan camp the houses were burned and the towers blown up, and Hutchinson says that if "some innocent" were punished with the guilty, it was "dictated by stern necessity". [2] On 13 to 15 November a column went into the Waran valley and levelled Mulla Sayyid Akbar's house. The mosque beside it was left, and the preacher's pulpit was carried off as "an interesting memento". [2]

The Orakzai had met their obligations by 20 December. The Afridi held out until April 1898, and the Gazetteer says they were "still further harried" in the meantime. [1] The Gazetteer says the campaign was fought in a difficult and unknown country "with an enemy who gave the troops no rest and pressed close on the heels of every retirement, while cleverly avoiding resistance in strength to an advance". [1]

The march down the Bara valley from 7 December was the army's hardest stretch. Hutchinson writes that his own side knew the movement was not "in the accepted sense, a movement in retreat", but "quite certain that such was the construction the enemy would put upon it". On 11 December, he says, the force lost not less than fifty or sixty men, and followers, stores and animals were abandoned and "fell into the hands of the enemy". [2] The Gazetteer calls the British passage of the Bara valley in 1897 "most arduous". [1]

Lockhart's farewell order of April 1898 says: "The boast of the tribes was that no foreign army, Moghal, Afghan, Persian, or British had ever penetrated, or could ever penetrate their country; but ... the troops succeeded in visiting every portion of Tirah", a fact "which will be kept alive in the minds of future generations by ruined forts and towers in their remotest valleys." [2] The British count for the expedition, to 6 April 1898, is 287 killed, 853 wounded and 10 missing. [2] Hutchinson gives no count of Afridi and Orakzai dead and says only that their losses in particular fights were "severe". [2]

The Gazetteer records a fine of Rs 50,000 and 800 breech-loading rifles by April 1898, and an October 1898 agreement by which the tribe would deal with no other power and not object to roads and railways through the Khyber, with the allowances restored. The Afridi article tells the rest. [1] The larger British wars with Afghanistan are in the three Anglo-Afghan wars.

Fruit, timber and charas

A Dawn report of 2025 says that before militants took the valley, residents grew rice, onions, apples, grapes, persimmons, tomatoes and potatoes. [24]

Forests are the other asset, and the other quarrel. In 2015 Dawn reported people in Tirah cutting trees to rebuild houses and to smuggle timber to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab. A survey by the Fata Disaster Management Authority had found about 14,000 houses, 80 per cent in Bagh-Maidan and nearby areas, needing urgent reconstruction, mostly for want of roofs, and residents said the Taliban had burned many houses and taken timber as they fled. Each tribe had formed village committees to allow cutting "according to the mutually agreed quota", and Fata's forest director said forest laws did not yet apply there. [28] In March 2021 a jirga of Tirah tribes at Bagh-Maidan banned the movement of timber, raw furniture and firewood out of the valley, with forest and vigilance committees to allow cutting for local needs only. [29] In March 2026 displaced residents told Dawn that trees, including century-old walnuts in a graveyard, were being cut for a 15-kilometre road and sold in Bara and Peshawar. The report carries no reply from officials. [30]

Tirah is also known for cannabis and opium poppy, which Pakistani law bans. A Dawn report of 2023 says that Tirah is traditionally known for poppy and that charas is traded at the Friday market at Bagh-Maidan. When police arrested two men from the Malakdin Khel and Kambar Khel carrying charas to it, scores of residents protested, saying the trade was their main income and that officials had promised it would not be disturbed until another livelihood was found. [25] A farmer in the valley told Dawn in 2025 that growing hemp and poppy was "a necessity and compulsion" for families hit by militancy, and the report says most farms lie on both sides of the Bara river. [24] AFP reported in 2012 that a Tirah shopkeeper, Zaman Afridi, said hash earned about double what wheat did and was the only income of many farmers. The same report says a kilo of charas that sold for about 20,000 rupees before the military operations rose to 50,000 to 65,000, and that groups holding Tirah took 2,000 rupees a kilo. [27] Dawn reported in October 2024, from anonymous local sources, that Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan and Lashkar-i-Islam were asking dealers for a share of the harvest. [26]

Bara and the militants, 2000s to 2014

Bara tehsil, about 12 miles from Peshawar, was the base of Lashkar-i-Islam under Mangal Bagh. Daud Khattak, a journalist with RFE/RL's Mashaal Radio, wrote in 2012 that by 2007 it was the most powerful militia in the Khyber agency, that it taxed the wealthy and minorities, barred women from markets and banned music. [4] AFP called Bara in 2012 a hash-trade centre. [27] In 2009, Dawn wrote, the army began an offensive to expel it, and the militants fled into Tirah. A curfew stayed in most of the tehsil for four years, more than 200 government schools and colleges and Bara Bazaar closed, and, in Dawn's figure, nearly 70,000 families fled. The Bara roads reopened in August 2013 under a ban on carrying arms. [31]

Khattak says Ansar-ul-Islam fled to Tirah after clashes with Lashkar-i-Islam, and that the Zakha Khel split from Lashkar-i-Islam in April 2011 and formed their own militia, Tawheedul Islam, which by November 2011 had pushed it out of Bara. [4] In March 2012 another offensive sent 9,233 families to Jalozai camp in Nowshera within days. [32] On 17 October 2014 the "Khyber-1" operation began with air strikes on Lashkar-i-Islam positions in Tirah and Bara. The Fata Disaster Management Authority said over 6,000 families had left Bara since 16 October. A former councillor, Hashim Khan Afridi, said elders were "intentionally kept in the dark". [33]

Tirah emptied and refilled

The people of Tirah date their exile differently. A man of the Kukikhel told Dawn in 2024 that "We have been living as internally displaced persons since 2011", and the same report says thousands of families left in 2013 and spent about ten years away. [21] Dawn's 2025 report on farmers says they left in 2012. [24] Khushal Khan, an Awami National Party writer, described in 2013 thousands of Tirah families in camps in Orakzai and Kurram after two months of fighting between Ansar-ul-Islam and Lashkar-i-Islam. [34] By 2015 families had returned to Bagh-Maidan and were rebuilding. [28]

Peace did not last. Taj Mohammad Kamarkhel, whose family was among more than 450 families told to leave in November 2023, said in January 2026, "Now it's over two years that we are left high and dry with no return plan in sight." [16] In August 2024 the army began operations in Tirah, and in September its spokesman called them "important and successful". [21] The same month Kukikhel from Rajgal and Sarawala spent 30 days blocking the Torkham highway to demand the return of more than 6,000 families still barred. An official said they were kept out for security reasons. [21]

On 12 June 2025 elders and officials met in Peshawar, and the elders said they would not agree to forced displacement, demanded Rs5 million for each destroyed house and Rs3 million for each damaged one, "reluctantly agreed" to temporary internal movement if each family were paid Rs500,000 in advance, and asked that an area declared cleared should not be operated in again. [18] On 28 July tribesmen carried the body of a girl killed by a mortar the day before to the brigade headquarters at Bagh-Maidan. Dawn's sources said at least six protesters died and 17 were wounded when security personnel opened fire, after some in the crowd torched an excavator and tried to force the gate. [19] On 22 September, a Dawn report says, jets hit four houses at night. A police officer told AFP they were "completely destroyed"; a provincial adviser said 25 people died, which Dawn could not confirm. The provincial government promised Rs10 million to each victim's family. [20]

A jirga at Lar Bagh on 5 November 2025, where the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam's district emir Hazrat Khan said the decision of the Tirah tribes was "final and unanimous", warned that anyone willing to leave would be treated as a "collective enemy of the people of the valley". [8] Families were already leaving. Mohammad Rasool Afridi of Bar Kamarkhel told the Express Tribune on 3 November that mortar shells had hit homes and mosques. Hamidullah Jan Afridi said, "Becoming IDPs is not easy, yet the intensity of the fighting has left people with no choice." [11] Residents told Dawn in December that Tehreek-i-Taliban, Lashkar-i-Islam and Hafiz Gul Bahadur affiliates had occupied houses and used locals as shields, and also wanted the militants gone "but not at the cost of troubling locals". [10]

On 20 December 2025 elders agreed to leave from 10 January, with the valley to be cleared by 25 January. [9] Registration at Bara had reached 19,586 families by 31 January. Sohbat Khan Afridi, spokesman of the Tirah delegation, said 150 people had been killed and over 200 injured, and a Peshawar High Court hearing heard that neither the federal nor the provincial government had authorised the operation. [14] The federal information ministry said no directive for "depopulation" had been issued and that people relocate each winter. The provincial government said families were pushed out. [9] Snow stranded families on the road. [9] Reports in July and August 2026 put the sit-in outside the Bara Press Club at 150 days, with only 21,000 of 34,000 recorded families verified for relief, and the chief secretary said in May that 1,400 families had received the promised cash grant. [13, 15, 17] On 28 September 2026, the deputy commissioner announced at a jirga at Tirah Maidan that returns would begin on 10 October, and elders asked for roads, schools, water and power first. [12] On 9 October Afghanistan International's Pashto service ran the headline:

اته میاشتې وروسته؛ د تیراه بې‌ځایه شوي لاهم خپلو سیمو ته د بېرته ستنېدو په تمه دي

Atha miāshte wrostah; da Tīrāh bé-zāyah shawī lāham khpalo sīmo ta da bérta stanédo pa tamah dī

After eight months, Tirah's displaced still wait to go back to their homes.

Sohbat Khan Afridi, spokesman of the displaced, said the written promise of return within two months had not been kept. [23]