Waziristan: mountains, valleys and towns

At a glance

• Waziristan is the hill country between the Kurram and Gomal rivers, west of Bannu and Tank and up to the Durand Line. The Tochi runs through North Waziristan and the Gomal along the edge of South Waziristan. [3, 7]

• Its highest named peaks are Pir Ghal, 11,600 feet, in the Mahsud country, and Shuidar, 11,000 feet, at the head of the Khaisora valley. [3]

• The Darwesh Khel Wazirs, the Mahsuds, the Daur of the Tochi valley, the Bhittani on the eastern edge and the Ormur (Burki) of Kaniguram, who speak a language of their own, share the country. [3, 8]

• A British army destroyed Makeen (Makin) in 1860. In 1919–20 and again from 1936 to 1947 Wazirs and Mahsuds fought the garrisons, roads and bombing that followed. [4–6]

• The first US drone strike in Pakistan hit a house in South Waziristan on 17 June 2004. The army entered South Waziristan in October 2009 and North Waziristan in June 2014, when more than a million people registered as displaced, most of them in Bannu. [2, 10, 26]

• The tribal districts were merged into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2018. Mohsin Dawar and Ali Wazir, two founders of the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement, won the two Waziristan seats in the National Assembly that year. [21, 23]

The hill country between the Tochi and the Gomal

Pakistan's 2023 census report places the Waziristan Hills between the Safed Koh and the Gomal river, crossed by the Kurram and the Tochi. The Tochi, also called the Gambila, rises in Khost and waters the Daur valley before it reaches Bannu. The Gomal is 400 km long and runs round South Waziristan into the plain of Tank. [7] (For the wider map, see the Pashtun lands.)

The 1908 Imperial Gazetteer, a British compilation, gave North Waziristan 2,310 square miles in four valleys: the Lower Kurram, the Kaitu, Daur on the Tochi, which it called the most open and fertile, and the Khaisora. Shuidar closes the Khaisora at its western end, and in the feverish late summer people moved up to its highlands. [3]

South Waziristan was larger, at 2,734 square miles, and in the Gazetteer's words mountainous in the extreme. The outer hills were bare and good only for goats, the inner hills carried ilex and pine, and to the south-west the land opened into the stony plains of Zarmelan, Wana and Spin. The Gomal was the only river with a strong current. [3] The pine-nut forests of Shawal still stand. In 2018 a Shawal elder, Malik Fasen Khan, asked that families displaced from the valley at least be helped to harvest their share of the nuts. [19]

The census report counts 675,215 people in South Waziristan's 6,620 square kilometres in 2017 and lists it and North Waziristan among the five most thinly peopled districts of the province, which it blames on poor infrastructure, geography and the law and order situation. It puts South Waziristan last in the province for houses of brick and cement, at 2.8 per cent, with North Waziristan at 18.9 per cent. [7]

Wazir, Mahsud, Daur and their neighbours

All of North Waziristan outside the Tochi valley belongs to the Darwesh Khel Wazirs (وزیر), in two sections, the Utmanzai and the Ahmadzai. The Ahmadzai hold Wana. [3] The Wazirs speak a broad dialect of Pashto, and the Gazetteer notes that they say Indi for "Hindu". [3]

The Mahsuds (محسود) hold the country to the south. The Gazetteer gives them three branches, Alizai, Shaman Khel and Bahlolzai, who split the tribe's gains and liabilities into three equal shares however many men each has. [3]

The Daur (داوړ) hold the Tochi valley. In 1908 it was 35 miles long, with about 75 walled hamlets and 24,670 people in 1903. They watered maize, rice, millet, sugar-cane, wheat and barley from channels cut off the Tochi and worked the heavy soil with the spade, since a plough would not break it. [3]

The Bhittani (بېټني) hold the hills between the Mahsuds and the plain of Tank. The Gazetteer calls them the Mahsuds' hereditary enemies. [3]

Places in the valleys

Miranshah lies in the Tochi valley 57 miles west of Bannu. In 1908 it was three or four hamlets at 3,050 feet and the headquarters of the Northern Waziristan Agency. [3] After 1919 the British fortified its mud fort and made it one of their first Royal Air Force stations in the subcontinent. [5]

Mir Ali, east of Miranshah, was the army's base camp in 1936, from which the Tochi column marched south into the Khaisora. [5]

Razmak is a plateau at 6,666 feet. A meeting at Delhi in January 1922 chose it for a cantonment because it lay close to the Mahsud heartland at Makin. [5] The Tochi Scouts' history says the finished cantonment was called Little London, with streets named after those of London and a cinema, a dancing hall and a swimming pool. [5]

Wana is where, in the Gazetteer's account, the Ahmadzai Wazirs invited the British to occupy their country in 1894. The Mahsuds under Mulla Powindah attacked the British escort camped there. [3]

Makeen was, in the Gazetteer's phrase, one of the chief strongholds of the Mahsuds. Iron was smelted in the hills above it. [3] The General Staff of the Indian Army wrote in 1921 that its army had destroyed Makin completely in 1860. [4] When the ground offensive of 2009 began, local officials reported air strikes on the Makeen area, which the BBC called a stronghold of the Mehsud tribe. [26]

Kaniguram and the Ormur

"Kaniguram is, properly speaking, the only town in Mahsud country," the General Staff wrote in 1921. Its people were mostly Urmars, the Pashto name for the Ormur (اورمړ). It was built in terraces on a spur above the Baddar Toi, with about a thousand houses and five towers, a bazaar and several rifle and knife factories. Mahsud national assemblies met there at the Urmars' expense, since tradition made them give free hospitality to the guests. [4] The Gazetteer adds that matchlocks (jazails) were once made there by the Nazar Khel, a Mahsud section. [3] (For the custom, see melmastia.)

The Ormur speak Ormuri, an Iranian language close to Parachi. Charles Kieffer wrote in the Encyclopaedia Iranica that its speakers call themselves Baraki. In the 1970s he counted 2,000 to 3,000 speakers at Kaniguram, Baraki and Sadat (descendants of the Prophet), "a prosperous community that dealt with the surrounding Pashtun on an equal footing", all bilingual or trilingual in Ormuri, Pashto and Hindko or Sindhi. A second dialect survives near Baraki Barak in Logar. [8] The Gazetteer of 1908 named the language Bargista. [3] (The Ormur have their own article.)

In 2011 the Express Tribune reported that the army's operation in South Waziristan had scattered the Burki, as it writes the name, and put their language at risk. It gave about 10,000 speakers before they left, more than Kieffer's count of the 1970s. Munawwar Burki, a Karachi University student from the valley, said about 500 of the 1,000 Burki families in Karachi spoke Ormuri. Rozi Khan Burki, who wrote a book wholly in Ormuri, said the Burki are Pashtuns who came to Kaniguram from Logar in 1025, and that when the language goes it will take plant names, proverbs and herbal medicine with it. [9]

1919–20: the war after the war

The British had entered Mahsud country before: in 1860 General Chamberlain's army occupied Kaniguram, spared it for a fine and destroyed Makin. [4]

In May 1919 Afghan regulars came down the Kaitu valley and, in Cheema's account, local Wazir sections joined them. On 25 May the British ordered the North Waziristan Militia, which had Wazir platoons, out of its posts in the upper Tochi, from Datta Khel to Boya. [5] On the night of 27 May the Wazir soldiers at Miranshah debated like a jirga whether to stay. Cheema, whose history of the Tochi Scouts reconstructs the night, has Jemadar Tarin, a Tori Khel Wazir and the adjutant, say to the commandant: "Sahib you know the situation, it is Jihad a religious war and I cannot serve you anymore and as such I am quitting." Subedar Major Tor Khan and Subedar Darim Khan held to their oath. The Wazirs were allowed to go without weapons, dug through the north wall of the fort and left with their rifles. [5]

The Mahsuds held a jirga at Kaniguram on 29 May. According to the General Staff, it resolved to return all stolen rifles and make friends again if its prisoners were released and its allowances continued, "but that otherwise they would fight". [4] The army's official history records the destruction of villages in the Khaisora ("the work of devastation in this area completed") and bombing by aeroplanes of the Kaniguram valley on 22 June and of Makin and Marobi, the home of Mulla Fazl Din, on the 26th. [4] In the winter of 1919–20 it told the Mahsuds that Makin and Kaniguram would be destroyed unless 200 government rifles were given up at each. A column reached Kaniguram on 6 March 1920, and active operations ceased on 7 May. [4]

The roads, and the Faqir of Ipi

Afterwards the British built roads and cantonments and re-formed the militias as the Tochi Scouts and South Waziristan Scouts. Haroon records that the tribes attacked survey parties and condemned any clan that sent labourers or khassadars (tribal police). A newspaper published by Indian mujahidin on the frontier, Al Mujahid, said in 1923 that the land had been "cut to pieces" by roads, posts and forts, and warned: "Mind that if the enemy succeeds even a little in Waziristan no other place in the frontier will be able to make any opposition to his aggressions". The British, Haroon says, bought the tribes' acquiescence with allowances that rose from about 130,000 rupees in 1919 to almost 280,000 by 1925, with 1.9 million more under the khassadar scheme, and bombed the pockets that remained. [6]

It returned in 1936. A court in Bannu ruled in the case of a young Hindu woman who had become a Muslim, called Islam Bibi in the sources, that she should live apart from her husband until she came of age, and Bannu's Muslims heard it as a decision for the Hindu community. [5, 6] The Tori Khel had also agreed to a road from Mir Ali into the lower Khaisora for 7,500 rupees a year. Mirza Ali Khan, the Faqir of Ipi, tied the two together. [5] Pakistan's 2023 census report records that "Mirza Ali Khan, a wazir from Waziristan, spearheaded a civil disobedience movement against the British in 1936". [7] Cheema divides the conflict into two phases: 1936 to 1938 in the lower Khaisora, then 1939 to 1947 from the Madda Khel country west of Miranshah, when Mahsuds joined and, he writes, no fewer than three infantry brigades and an air group were committed to the hunt. [5] In April 1937 Mahsuds and Bhittani ambushed a convoy at Shahur Tangi, and Cheema counts seven British officers killed. [5]

Haroon notes that the government could not corner him, and that its "furore about the fanaticism of the Wazirs and their mulla" hid a deeper fear that its tribal policy could only partly contain what people did. [6] Cheema writes that his grave at Gurweikht is a place where the tribes pray. [5] The full story is in the Faqir of Ipi, and the war that began this round in the Anglo-Afghan wars.

2004 to 2013: drones and a war with no front

The army entered South Waziristan in March 2004 against a young tribal leader, Nek Mohammed, and Musharraf made a peace deal within weeks after heavier losses than expected. The truce failed. On the evening of 17 June 2004 a drone struck a courtyard in Kari Kot village and killed Nek Mohammed and five others. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism wrote that two of the dead were boys, reported at 10 and 16, and that the army first claimed the strike as its own. Two eyewitnesses disagreed on who had died, and Amnesty's researcher said the children's names differ between sources because people in Waziristan carry religious, tribal and official names. [10]

In December 2005 Hayatullah Khan, a reporter for the Urdu daily Ausaf, photographed the remains of a Hellfire missile in Miranshah after the death of the al-Qaeda figure Hamza Rabia, which the government said came from an explosion inside the house. Gunmen took him on the road at Mir Ali on 5 December, and his body was found there on 16 June 2006, shot in the back of the head. The Committee to Protect Journalists said he had been threatened by the security forces, the Taliban and local tribesmen. [11]

Amnesty counted between 330 and 374 drone strikes in Pakistan from 2004 to September 2013, from NGO and government sources whose figures it did not endorse, with 400 to 900 civilians killed. The United States says its strikes are accurate and kill mostly members of armed groups. [1] One was at Ghundi Kala on 24 October 2012, when Mamana Bibi, 68, was killed by two Hellfire missiles while picking okra in her family's field, in front of her grandchildren. Her granddaughter Nabeela, eight, told Amnesty: "I wasn't scared of drones before, but now when they fly overhead I wonder, will I be next?" Amnesty said it could not reach firm conclusions on the context, since the United States gives no information, but that some strikes may amount to unlawful killings. [1]

Residents also described the Pakistani army's own fire. "Our routine life is affected as curfew is imposed every Sunday," Gulab Khan of Mir Ali told Amnesty. Rafeequl Rehman of Tappi said that after a roadside bomb the political agent's staff telephoned the elders to tell the village to leave, and mortars were fired at four in the morning. [1] On 9 May 2013 the Peshawar High Court held the strikes in the tribal areas, particularly North and South Waziristan, to be illegal war crimes and told the federal government to raise them at the United Nations. The deputy attorney general had told the court that no agreement allowed them. [12]

2009 and 2014: two operations

On 17 October 2009 two army divisions, 28,000 men, went into South Waziristan, against Taliban fighters the BBC put at between 10,000 and 20,000. Up to 20,000 people had left within days, and fleeing civilians said the government had made little provision for them. [26] Al Jazeera later reported that more than 600,000 Mahsuds were displaced. [20] The army says South Waziristan is safe, Al Jazeera wrote in 2018, but many stay away because their homes were destroyed and there are no basic services. [20]

The army announced Operation Zarb-e-Azb in North Waziristan on 15 June 2014, a week after the attack on Karachi airport. By the next day it said 187 militants were dead. [13, 14] Defence Minister Khawaja Asif said the decision followed the failure of dialogue: "The operation will continue until it reaches its logical conclusion." The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf's Arif Alvi said his party had not been told and that a large offensive would send refugees into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. [13] The ISPR said elders from Miranshah, Mir Ali and Datta Khel had promised support. [27]

The residents' account came on the road. On 18 June 30,000 people reached Bannu from Mir Ali in one morning after the curfew was eased. Azizur Rehman, a schoolteacher of 42 who left riding on the bonnet of a truck, said of the days before the offensive: "They start the day with artillery shelling early in the morning. Helicopters come for shelling during the day". [15] By 20 June 227,049 people had registered at the Saidgi checkpoint on the Bannu–Miranshah road, and Nasr Minallah called the road "a sea of people heading towards Bannu". [16] By 1 September the provincial authority had registered 1,016,559 people, 74 per cent of them women and children. [2] (Bannu took most of them.) By December 2015 the ISPR counted 3,400 militants killed and 488 soldiers and paramilitaries killed. [18]

The army approved a phased return on 8 December 2014 to areas it had cleared. [17] By August 2018, the authorities said, 92,966 of 107,335 displaced families had gone home and 14,369 were waiting, among them families from Shawal who had walked nearly 100 km to Bannu. "What sins have we committed that they are not letting us back into our houses?" asked Salma, a housewife from Darpakhel, on Radio Mashaal. The tribal disaster authority said it was ready, but that "the military needs to give us the security clearance". [19]

Merger and a new politics

The National Assembly passed the amendment merging the tribal areas with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on 24 May 2018 by 229 votes to one, with members of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (F) and the Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party walking out. [23] In 2019 South Waziristan had its first member in the provincial assembly, Anita Mehsud, who named schools for girls as her first concern. [24]

Manzoor Pashteen, who comes from Sarwakai in South Waziristan, was among the young activists who founded the Mehsud Tahafuz Movement in 2014 to protect their tribe. After the police killing in Karachi in January 2018 of Naqeebullah Mehsud, a young man from Waziristan, it became the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement. A police inquiry ordered by the Supreme Court found no evidence that he was a terrorist. [20] The movement's leaders say 32,000 Pashtuns have gone missing from the tribal areas in a decade. [22] Pashteen put the figure at tens of thousands, which Al Jazeera could not verify, while a government commission counted at least 1,640 missing across the country by February 2018. The military has denied wrongdoing. Police registered a case against Pashteen over his speeches at the Pashtun Long March, and the movement's co-founder Said Alam Mehsud answered that it acts within the law. [20]

In the elections of 2018 Mohsin Dawar won the seat for North Waziristan with 16,496 votes and Ali Wazir that of South Waziristan with 23,530. [21] Both sat as independents. [22]

East of the hills, thousands rallied for peace in Bannu in October 2024, and elders said the provincial government had not carried out the demands agreed after their July jirga. [25]