The Wazir tribe: Darwesh Khel of Waziristan and Birmal

At a glance

• The Wazir (وزیر, Wazir) are a Karlanri Pashtun tribe. The genealogy collected by Denzil Ibbetson and printed in Rose's Glossary traces them to Sulaiman, son of Kakai, and to Sulaiman's son Khizrai. [1]

• Khizrai's sons were Musa Darwesh, Mahsud and Gurbuz. Musa's line, the Darwesh Khel, is the Wazir proper, in two sections: the Utmanzai in the north and the Ahmadzai in the south. [1, 2]

• They hold North Waziristan outside the Daur valley, the Wana and Shakai plains of South Waziristan and, in Afghanistan, Barmal district of Paktika. [2, 4]

• The tribe has no chief. The Gazetteer of 1908 calls the Wazir "intensely democratic", and Rose says the two great sections were practically independent tribes. [1, 2]

• On 27 May 1919 about six hundred Wazir militiamen walked out of Miranshah with their rifles to join the jihad. In 1929 Wazir and Mahsud lashkars helped Nadir Khan retake Kabul. [3, 8]

• In May 2004 the Ahmadzai Wazir raised a lashkar of their own and then stopped to ask to see the text of the Shakai agreement. In June 2014 about thirty thousand people left Mir Ali for Bannu in one day. [13, 17]

Speech and name

Waziristan, in Rose's words, is "the land of the Wazirs". [1] The Imperial Gazetteer found their Pashto "a very broad dialect", with "curious modifications of the vowels", so that Hindu becomes Indi. [2] For where it sits among the others, see Pashto dialects.

Sulaiman, Khizrai and the foundling

Rose's Glossary, published in 1919, runs the line from the Karlanri ancestor Kakai to his son Sulaiman. Sulaiman had two sons, Lalai and Khizrai. Lalai fled after a blood feud and settled in Nangarhar, on the northern slopes of the western Safed Koh. His descendants, the Lalai Wazir, still live between Jalalabad and Parachinar. [1] Khizrai had three sons. Musa, nicknamed Darwesh ("faqir") for his piety, fathered the largest section, the Darwesh Khel. Mahsud fathered the Mahsud. The third son's son Gurbuz gave his name to the Gurbuz, who live between Khost and the Tochi valley above Miranshah. [1]

The same entry prints a Wazir story that runs differently. Abdullah, a chief of the Urmur with no son, walked onto the Wana plain the morning after a king's army had camped there and found a baby hidden under a frying pan, karahai in Pashto. He took the child home. The boy married an Urmur girl and had a son, Sulaiman, whose own son was Wazir. [1]

Mahsud, Wazir and what the name covers

The sources do not agree on whether the Mahsud are Wazir. Rose and the Gazetteer both describe the Wazir as a tribe of two branches, the Mahsud and the Darwesh Khel. [1, 2] The British army's history of 1919–20 says tradition gives the two one origin, calls that tradition's truth "very doubtful", and applies the name Wazir to the Darwesh Khel alone. [3] Rose adds that the two sections own no common head and that the Darwesh Khel used to arrange a tora, an expedition, against the Mahsud every year. In 1901 or 1902 they attacked from Spin, Wana and Razmak and the Mahsud beat them off with heavy loss. [1] The Mahsud have their own page. Here "Wazir" means the Darwesh Khel.

From Birmal to the Tochi and the Gomal

The Wazir say Birmal was their first home, in the hills west of the Khost range. About the close of the fourteenth century, in Rose's account, they began to move east. They crossed the range, drove the Bannuchi out of Shawal, took the hills north of the Tochi, crossed the river and pushed the Urmur out of the hills to the south towards Logar, near Kabul. They took Kaniguram from the Bitanni. From the hills round Shuidar they spread south to the Gomal. [1, 2]

Rose lists what the Darwesh Khel took, and from whom: Wana from the Nasir, Dotanni and Midni; Spin from the Dotanni and Nasir; Razmak from the Urmur; the upper Tochi from the Marwat; the Kaitu valley from the Landar and Sadak; the Kurram valley from the Bangash and Orakzai; and Birmal from the Marwat, Mangal and Zadran. One Wazir told a British official, J. Donald, as a joke, that they had really got most of it by mortgage, since the old owners could not repay their loans. Rose answers that "probably force had more to say to it". [1]

Utmanzai and Ahmadzai

Rose gives the Ahmadzai nine sub-sections, among them Hathi Khel, Sperkai and Bizan Khel. They hold the south and the Bannu border, from Gumatti and the Saro plain to Wana, Spin, Dhana and Shakai. The Utmanzai he divides into seven: Mohmit Khel, Madda Khel, Kabul Khel, Manzar Khel, Tori Khel, Bakka Khel and Jani Khel. They hold the Kurram, Kaitu, Tochi and Khaisora valleys, Shawal and the Birmal valley. [1] The Faqir of Ipi was a Tori Khel. The tribe pages tell each section: Utmanzai and Ahmadzai.

A country on both sides of the line

The Durand Line of 1893 cut through them. In the agreement of November 1893 the amir gave up his claim to Waziristan "the Birmal tract excepted", which left Birmal with Kabul. [3] Rose, writing of the tribe as he knew it, says the Wazir "still nominally hold the Birmal country", though Suleiman Khel and Kharoti Ghilzai winter there with their flocks and the Wazir stay inside their walled villages while the nomads are present. [1]

Today the Afghanistan Analysts Network, in a 2024 report by the researcher Sabawoon Samim, says Wazir live in Barmal district of Paktika and across the line in North and South Waziristan. [4] A page of the US Naval Postgraduate School's culture and conflict programme puts it the same way. [9] Since 2017 Pakistan has fenced the line. Samim's interviewee from Paktika, a man in his fifties, described Kharsin, a border village in Barmal: "the entire village consisted of one clan", and when the fence reached it the Pakistani forces "pointed to an area in the middle of the village" and cut it in half. Relatives, he said, can only wave to each other from afar. [4] The line itself is told in the Durand Line of 1893.

Black tents, mud huts and the Friday fair

The Wazir were, in Rose's phrase, "till lately wholly nomad and pastoral". [1] The army's history says the Utmanzai went up to the higher hills in summer and down to the foothills and valleys in winter, while most of the Ahmadzai drove their flocks each autumn to the grazing on the western edge of Bannu district and returned in spring to Wana and Shakai. [3] In South Waziristan the Gazetteer found wheat, barley, rice, maize and millet, often cut green for fodder and left to spring up again for harvest, small black cattle in good condition, and fat-tailed sheep. Not enough grain grew for everyone. [2]

Rose watched black tents give way to mud huts and noted Wazir traders at the Friday fair in Bannu. [1] At a wedding, he writes, a party of a hundred to a hundred and fifty sets out for the bride's village, the men dancing in front with swords and firing matchlocks, the women behind singing war songs and love songs, and the boys of the village meet it with a shower of stones before it enters the house. [1] Wazir names include many that are not Muslim names: Spingul, "white flower", and Prang, a leopard. [1]

Jirga, shares and the rules of four hundred years ago

The Gazetteer says the Wazir are "by instinct intensely democratic". Any man may rise by courage and wisdom to be a malik, but maliks "have often little influence and no real authority", and men who tried to take it were assassinated. [2] The army's history says the same from the other side: the jirgas of the Waziristan tribes, especially the Mahsud, could give no reliable guarantee that the terms they accepted would be kept. [3] Shakir Ullah Ansari of the Pashto Academy at the University of Peshawar, writing in 2021, describes the Waziristan jirga as a council of elders who decide, carry out the decision and keep the peace, and says it has survived because colonial powers never completely controlled the country. [6] For the institution in general see the jirga.

Rose records a code agreed by the Wazir elders at a council about four hundred years before his time, sealed with dua khair, the raising of hands in prayer. It was life for life: the killer's life was forfeit, though revenge might reach his agnates. To make peace, the killer's relatives went with tribal leaders and mullahs to the injured family's house as intercessors, a custom Rose spells ninawatti (compare nanawatai). He gives the blood price as 1,200 Kabuli rupees for a Pashtun and 360 for a dependant, paid half in cash and half in land, cattle and two girls. [1] The Gazetteer gives another figure, 650 rupees, for compounding a murder. [2] A man who sought a protector as a hamsaya killed a sheep before him and was thereafter protected "at considerable risk to themselves". [1]

Land followed descent. Rose writes that the Darwesh Khel ancestors divided the country among the sub-sections "either according to the numerical strength of each or on ancestral shares, and that distribution still holds good". [1] The call to arms worked the same way, in what Rose calls the chalweshta: a clan leader had the tribe's sanction to order out the clansmen, and a man who stayed home risked having his sheep looted or his tent burned. [1]

The word nikat reaches print through a dispute between Wazir and Mahsud in South Waziristan. Two Pakistani political scientists, Abid Latif and Razia Musarrat, wrote in 2012 that the government brought in a system of nikat in 1950 to settle the old rivalry: three quarters of development money to the Mahsud, one quarter to the Wazir. The Wazir, they say, have not accepted it, and there is "a lot of hidden acrimony". [5] They cite no source for the date or the ratio. In May 2024 elders of both tribes met at Dera Ismail Khan under the divisional commissioner over a land dispute, and agreed to settle the Gomal boundary through talks and to mark it by historical maps. [20]

Between Kabul and Delhi, 1884 to 1894

In 1884 the amir of Afghanistan tried to establish his rule over the Wazir, and in the British army's own words the attempt "met with little or no support from the tribesmen". [3] The Government of India insisted on the Wazirs' independence and on its right to deal with them directly. [3]

The Wana Wazirs made their own move. The army's history says the Ahmadzai of Wana invited the British to take over their country in 1892, and the government accepted in 1894, when the boundary commission came. [3] The army's history says the aims were to keep out Afghan officials and the Powindah nomads and to secure the Gomal road from the Mahsud. [3] A large jirga of Wana Wazirs came into camp on 25 October 1894, the day it arrived, and "appeared pleased". [3] The night attack on the escort that followed was made by Mahsuds under Mullah Powindah, not by the Ahmadzai (Mullah Powindah). [2, 3] Rose says the Darwesh Khel were "very much broken up" by the British advance to Wana and the Tochi and by their own disunion. [1]

Maizar, 1897

The Tochi went the other way. The Gazetteer says the Daur, the cultivators of the Tochi valley, asked for British protection in 1894 because of Darwesh Khel raids on them. [2] On 10 June 1897 a British political officer went with an unusually strong escort to Maizar, a Madda Khel village in the upper Tochi, to collect a fine. In the Gazetteer's telling the troops were entertained and then attacked, and all the British military officers were killed or wounded. It counts five British officers and men killed. [2] Two brigades, seven thousand men, went to Datta Khel and laid waste the Madda Khel lands, with fines and the surrender of ringleaders, six of them in one place in the Gazetteer and seventeen in another. Final submission did not come until 1901. [2] The Wazir held aloof from the wider risings of 1897 and 1898. [2] That is the government's account; it names no Madda Khel speaker.

1919: the militia walks out

Wazir men served in the militias the British raised. In May 1919, as Afghan regulars moved towards Khost and the British ordered the upper Tochi posts evacuated, letters came from Afghan officials in Khost asking the Wazir officers of the North Waziristan Militia to desert and help expel the British. The recipients showed them to their British officers. [3] On the afternoon of 27 May, urged on by Jemadar Adjutant Tarin, a Tori Khel Wazir, and Subedar Pat, a Madda Khel Wazir decorated in British service, about six hundred Wazirs at Miranshah mutinied, declared they would join the jihad, dug through the wall of the post in the dark and left with their rifles. The Khattak soldiers stayed. [3] The upper Tochi Wazirs, the Madda Khel, Manzar Khel and Khiddar Khel, had already streamed after the withdrawing column with the upper Daur, and Mahsuds joined them near Miranshah. [3]

At Wana, when the Southern Waziristan Militia withdrew on 26 May, all the Wazirs deserted, and the army's history counts about 1,190 rifles lost. [3]

The government answered in November. Notices dropped from aircraft over the Tochi Wazirs warned that refusal of terms would bring "immediate air operations" and told families to move women and children to safety. [3] On 17 November General Climo met the Tochi Wazir jirga at Datta Khel. All but the Madda Khel and two small sub-tribes in the Kaitu valley accepted. The Kazha Madda Khel, who had not come in, were bombed by seventeen aeroplanes the next day and submitted that evening. The other two were bombed in December. [3] The terms told the Tochi Wazirs that the report of an amnesty secured for them by the amir was "without foundation" and that their country would not be handed to him. The war is told in the Anglo-Afghan wars and Waziristan.

Nadir Khan and Kabul, 1929

May Schinasi, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, credits Nadir Khan with rallying the Mahsud and Waziri tribes of India in 1919 and so securing the Afghan victory at Thal. [8] The article on Mohammad Nadir Shah notes that other accounts say the Thal garrison held.

In 1929, when Habibullah Kalakani held Kabul, Nadir came back from France. Arriving in India with the discreet help of the British, Schinasi writes, he "had no difficulty mobilizing the border tribes, once again including the Masʿud and the Waziri". After two failed attempts Kabul was retaken on 13 October 1929 and sacked, and the troops proclaimed Nadir king on 15 October. [8]

The Shakai agreement and the lashkar of 2004

The Faqir's war of 1936 to 1947 is in his own article.

On 24 April 2004, at Shakai in South Waziristan, the government made an agreement with the militant leader Nek Muhammad. In Daud Khattak's account in the CTC Sentinel, the government released prisoners and paid compensation for damaged property, and Nek Muhammad agreed to register foreign militants and stop cross-border attacks. [7] Within days the two sides disagreed about exactly that. On 9 May Nek Muhammad said: "Registration of foreign militants was never part of the agreement." [11]

The Wazir elders were not bystanders. On 9 May the South Waziristan administrator told a jirga of the Ahmadzai Wazir sub-tribes they had less than a day to comply. [11] On 10 May the Ahmadzai Wazir raised a lashkar to hunt foreign militants. [12] On 11 May its commander, Allahgai Wazir, said its 1,800 men would not act until the government made clear that registering foreigners had been part of the deal. A committee of elders asked the deputy administrator, Rehmatullah Wazir, to show them the document, and he said they could not get it. [13] The lashkar held back. Nek Muhammad's death in a drone strike that June is told in Waziristan.

Wana since then

The Express Tribune wrote on 3 January 2013 that Mullah Nazir, "a powerful elder of the Wazir tribe" and South Waziristan's main militant commander, had been killed by a drone strike at Sara Kanda, in the Birmal tehsil of Wana subdivision. Thousands attended his funeral at Azam Warsak and the bazaars of Wana and Azam Warsak closed. [14]

Arif Wazir, a leader of the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement, was shot outside his home at Ghwa Khwa near Wana on 1 May 2020 and died in Islamabad the next day. [15] Dawn reported that seven members of his family, among them his father Saadullah Jan and his uncle Mirza Alam, had died in a clash with militants near Wana in 2007. RFE/RL said the family had been targeted since 2003 and that he was the eighteenth male member of his extended family to be killed. [15, 16] His cousin, the lawmaker Ali Wazir, was attacked in Wana in June 2018. [16]

2014 and after

The army began Operation Zarb-e-Azb in North Waziristan in June 2014. On 18 June about thirty thousand people left Mir Ali for Bannu after the curfew was eased. Azizur Rehman, a teacher aged forty-two who left on the bonnet of a truck, said of the days before: "They start the day with artillery shelling early in the morning." [17] Three thousand families had registered in Khost, in Afghanistan, by that day. [17] Most of those who crossed went to the Gulan camp. In December 2020 elders told Arab News that at least twelve thousand families were still there, where the government put the figure at five to seven thousand, and Malik Abdullah Noor, an elder in the camp, said: "We live in squalid conditions with no proper schools for our children or any health facility." [18] The Norwegian Refugee Council counted about 72,000 Waziristan refugees in Khost and Paktika in October 2019 and called their position "legal limbo". [10]

The National Assembly merged the tribal areas into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on 24 May 2018 and repealed Article 247, which had put them under the president. [19] The Wazir are now citizens of a province, but the commissioner who chaired the Dera Ismail Khan jirga of 2024 still spoke of settling the boundary "as per tribal traditions". [20]