The Afridi: Pashtun tribe of the Khyber and Tirah

The Afridi hold the hills between Peshawar and the Safed Koh (Spin Ghar, سپين غر): the Khyber Pass, the Bazar and Bara valleys, the Kajuri plain and, in summer, the high basin of Tirah Maidan. A few live in Afghanistan. The man is an Aprīdai (اپريدی), the tribe Aprīdī (اپريدي), and Afridis themselves turn f into p: Olaf Caroe heard them call themselves Aparidai. [4] Their speech is the hard northern Pashto, Pakhto, which the Imperial Gazetteer of 1908 found close to the Yusufzai standard, with its own accent and some words of its own. [1] [6]

Tradition makes their ancestor Faridun, a descendant of Karlan, which places them in the Karlanri group of hill tribes with the Wazir, Bangash, Orakzai and Khattak. [1] [4] Charles Kieffer's Encyclopaedia Iranica entry traces the same descent from Karlan but also groups the Afridi with the "eastern" Pashtuns and the Ghilzai, so even the specialist literature does not classify them in one way. [1] H. W. Bellew, writing in 1880, recorded that the Afridi, with the Orakzai, Bangash, Khattak, Tori and their neighbours, were divided between two hereditary factions, Samal and Gar, which no man ever changed. [7]

The eight clans

Six clans are counted as the Khyber Afridi. Two more, the Adam Khel and the Aka Khel, are described by Kieffer as assimilated clans which the six do not fully recognise. [1] A Pashto-language account gives the branches as ملک دین خېل (Malikdin Khel), قنبر خېل (Kambar Khel), کوکي خېل (Kuki Khel), زخه خېل (Zakha Khel), سه پای (Sipah), کمر خېل (Kamar Khel or Kamrai), اکا خېل (Aka Khel) and ادم خېل (Adam Khel). [10]

The Imperial Gazetteer's table, drawn up after the Tirah campaign, gives the Khyber clans their country and the number of fighting men the government reckoned each could put in the field. Kieffer places the other two. [6] [1]

• Kambar Khel: Tirah Maidan, the Bara valley and the Kajuri valley; 4,500 men.

• Malikdin Khel: Tirah; 5,000 men. Their chiefs lived at Chora in the lower Bazar valley. [6] [11]

• Zakha Khel: the Khyber, the Bazar valley and the Bara valley; 4,500 men.

• Kuki Khel: Rajgal in Tirah, and the Khyber around Ali Masjid and Jamrud. [11]

• Sipah: the Bara valley and the Kajuri plain; 1,200 men.

• Kamrai (Kamar Khel): the Bara valley; 600 men.

• Aka Khel: south of the Bara river, next to the Orakzai.

• Adam Khel: the hills between Peshawar and Kohat, on both sides of the Kohat Pass.

The Adam Khel, the "Pass Afridis" of British reports, were the one large section that did not migrate between summer and winter grounds. [1] [6] Khushal Khan Khattak wrote a long, frank poem on the beauty of the Adam Khel girls of the Kohat Pass, which Caroe quotes in translation: "Fair and rosy are the Adam Khel maidens, / Among them are beauties of every type". [4]

Summer in Tirah, winter in the Khyber

J. W. Murray's Dictionary of the Pathan Tribes found most Afridi still moving with the seasons at the end of the nineteenth century: up to Tirah in summer, down to the Khyber, Bazar and Kajuri valleys in winter. [1] Mountstuart Elphinstone heard the same in Peshawar in 1809. The "Khyberees", he was told, lived in terraced houses in their valleys, in movable mat huts on the mountains in summer, and in winter in caves cut into the earthy hillsides of the lower hills. He described them in dark-blue turbans and long, close-fitting dark-blue tunics reaching to mid-calf, with sandals of straw or dwarf-palm leaf, carrying matchlocks fitted with a wooden fork as a rest. He reckoned the Afridi, Shinwari and Orakzai together at about 120,000 people. [8]

Tirah Maidan lies about thirty miles from Peshawar, at six to seven thousand feet under the pine-covered crest of the Safed Koh. Caroe wrote that every Afridi spoke of Maidan and its extension Rajgal as the rival of Kashmir, and that no stranger was admitted there. [4] Kieffer adds that the Afridi took Tirah early in the nineteenth century from the Tirahi, a Dardic-speaking people. [1] For the neighbouring tribe of Tirah, see the Orakzai.

Where the Afridi came from

Herodotus lists a people called the Aparytai in the seventh satrapy of the Persian empire, next to the Gandarioi of the Peshawar valley. Bellew in 1880 had no doubt that the Afridi were the Aparytai, and Caroe in 1958 thought the equation reasonable, noting that Grierson and Stein had made it before him and that the Afridi habit of saying p for f brings the two names close. [7] [4] Kieffer rejects it. The Persian inscriptions never mention the Aparytai, nobody knows where they lived, and the sound changes needed to reach Apridi are, in his view, highly improbable. [1]

Many Afridis hold that they descend from the soldiers of Alexander. Caroe observed that the belief was common on the Frontier, and that it almost certainly came from the Greek learning translated into Arabic under the Abbasids, since no Asian record mentions Alexander's march at all. [4] Kieffer calls it a folk tradition shared across the Dardic and Kafir country, spread by Akbar's secretary Abu'l-Fazl and revived by nineteenth-century orientalists. [1]

Kieffer's own view is that the Afridi are largely of Dardic origin, since their settlements seem to have changed little over a long period. Bellew recorded a tradition that Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni planted them in the Khyber as a military colony and that Muhammad of Ghor strengthened it with fresh settlers. Kieffer thinks this tradition probably historical and sees no conflict with a Dardic core. [1]

The tribe tells its own story of its name. A governor of Peshawar, Bellew was told, found an Afridi sitting at the door of his court who would not rise for him. "Who am I?" the man answered when asked, Dzah tsok yam?, and then: Dzah hum Afridai yam, "I too am a creature of God." In Persian āfrīda means a created being. [7]

Masters of the road

The Peshawar valley is ringed by mountains broken by four routes: the open road east to the Punjab, the Malakand to the north, the Khyber to the west and the Kohat Pass to the south. The Afridi hold the last two, and took toll from whoever used them. [1] In Elphinstone's day they kept posts along the Khyber to collect "an authorised toll" in quiet times, and took a large pension from the king in Kabul on condition that the road stayed quiet. [8]

The Khyber between Jamrud and Landi Kotal did not always belong to all the clans. The Imperial Gazetteer records that it was first shared by the Shinwari, the Zakha Khel, the Kuki Khel and the Orakzai, and that the Orakzai were pushed out when the Sikhs reached Jamrud. In 1840, while Colonel Mackeson was negotiating with the tribe, the Malikdin Khel maliks of Chora forced their way in between the Zakha Khel and Kuki Khel and built a small village at Katta Kushta near Ali Masjid. The Sipah, Kambar Khel and Kamrai then claimed their share of the Khyber allowance too. [6]

Babur is the first ruler known to have tried to bring the Afridi under control. [1] Akbar improved the road enough for wheeled carts, but the Imperial Gazetteer judged that the Mughals were "singularly unsuccessful" in keeping it open against a tribe "implacably hostile" to them. [6]

The battle at the head of the Khyber, 1672

In the spring of 1672 the Mughal governor of Kabul, Muhammad Amin Khan, set out from Peshawar, earlier than usual, on the governor's yearly move to Kabul, meaning to punish the Safi tribe on the way after a quarrel with one of his officers. The Mohmand and Safi tribes formed a confederacy with large numbers of Afridi and Shinwari and blocked the road at the edge of the Loargai plateau, between Landi Kotal and Landi Khana, where the road begins to drop towards Afghanistan. [4]

Amin camped at Jamrud and sent the Mohmand Arbab of the Peshawar plain forward with a jirga to demand free passage. The tribes refused. The army passed Ali Masjid and the narrows without trouble, but at Loargai found breastworks thrown across the defile. Caroe names the leaders of the resistance as two Afridi chiefs, Aimal Khan and Darya Khan, the heroes of Khushal Khan's poems. Boulders piled on the slopes were rolled onto the Mughal columns, both flank commanders were killed, and the breastworks held all day. Amin was then advised to turn the position by the Tahtarra stream; the guide led the army into a trap. Caroe relates that Amin and four others were the only survivors, and that his wife, mother, sister and daughters were taken. Some women were later ransomed. Amin's wife refused to return. [4]

The Imperial Gazetteer puts Amin's army at 40,000 men and says the tribes took his treasure, elephants, women and children. [6] The figure comes from the tribal side. Khushal Khan Khattak, who as a Mughal vassal was probably no further forward than Jamrud that day, later counted it as the first of his people's victories: [4] [9]

The first fight was in the lofty ridge of Tahtar, When scattered were forty thousand Moghal foe. Their sisters and daughters became captives of the Pathan, Their horses, camels, elephants, and baggages.

In another poem he prays for his two allies: "[Aimal] Khan and Darya Khan, from death God preserve them, / Never have they failed me at the time of need." [9] Caroe calls both men Afridi and describes Khushal and "Aimal Khan, Afridi" storming the Mughal fort at Nowshera together in 1674. [4] The Pashto Wikipedia article on Darya Khan, which draws on Khushal's poems and Afzal Khan Khattak's Tarikh-i Murassa, names him as Darya Khan son of Piyao Khan and calls Aimal Khan a Mohmand. [10]

The pass stayed shut for two years. [2] Mughal armies were beaten again at Gandab in Mohmand country in 1673 and in the Khapakh Pass in 1674, and Aurangzeb came north in person, staying at Attock to direct the war. [4] [3]

Allowances, Afghans and the British

Ahmad Shah Durrani enrolled Afridi fighters only nominally. [1] Kabul's rulers paid the tribes allowances to keep the road open before the First Anglo-Afghan War and again after it. [2] The Sikh general Hari Singh built Jamrud fort at the mouth of the pass in 1836. [2]

In July 1839 Captain Wade marched up the Khyber from Jamrud with 10,000 to 11,000 men, Sikhs included, escorting Shah Shuja's son Timur to Kabul. The defenders of Ali Masjid, 509 jazailchis (musketeers) backed by several hundred Afridis, gave up the fort on 27 July; the British lost 22 killed and 158 wounded. Later about 6,000 Afridis stormed the post near Lala China, garrisoned by sickly Yusufzai auxiliaries who had just been paid, and killed 400 of them. In January 1842 Afridis closed the pass against the brigade sent to relieve Jalalabad, and Lieutenant-Colonel Moseley's two regiments, cut off at Ali Masjid with almost no food, had to fight their way back to Jamrud. [6]

From 1857 to 1878 the Afridi were subsidised from Kabul, which kept an Afghan garrison at Ali Masjid, and shortly before the Second Anglo-Afghan War Amir Sher Ali gave about 5,000 rifles to the Afridi and Shinwari jirgas. When the British took Ali Masjid in November 1878 the Afridis stripped the retreating Afghan troops of their clothes and rifles in the Khyber and the Bazar valley. [6] The Zakha Khel malik Walli Muhammad Khan guided the Afghan garrison out of Ali Masjid by night through the Bazar valley, went to Kabul, and came over to the British only on Amir Yakub Khan's advice. Robert Warburton, who took charge of the Khyber in 1879, listed the four leading maliks who had sided with the Amir: Ahmad Khan of the Sipah, Sarfaraz Khan of the Malikdin Khel, Abdulla Nur of the Kuki Khel and Walli Muhammad Khan. [11]

The Treaty of Gandomak, signed on 26 May 1879, gave the British control of the Khyber and Michni passes. [5] The Afridi were then granted allowances totalling Rs 87,540 a year, and their maliks signed an agreement to guard the pass with their own men. A levy of about 400 jezailchis, later 600, was raised to escort caravans; it became the Khyber Rifles. [6] Caroe credits its founding to Aslam Khan, son of Shah Shuja's wazir Muhammad Usman Khan, a Saddozai whom the Afridi had more than once sheltered at Chora. [4]

In August 1897 the Afridi attacked the Khyber posts and sacked the fortified serai at Landi Kotal, which the Khyber Rifles could not hold for want of water. Sir William Lockhart's force went into Tirah, and by April 1898 the tribe had paid a fine of Rs 50,000 and handed over 800 breech-loading rifles. Under the settlement of October 1898 the allowances were restored, with Rs 250 more for the Kambar Khel, and the Afridi agreed to deal with no other power and to accept roads and railways through the Khyber. [6] Kieffer notes that the tribe used each Anglo-Afghan war and both world wars to press its independence, and that its position made the British generous with subsidies. [1]

British writers of these years were hostile. Bellew called the Afridi robbers with no real religion, and Elphinstone wrote that he had never heard of anyone hiring a Khyber escort, as travellers did in the lands of every other tribe. [7] [8]

Numbers

Murray counted 32,900 Afridi fighting men at the end of the nineteenth century. C. C. Davies, in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, put the whole tribe at about 50,000, which Kieffer thought reasonable. Unofficial Afghan sources claimed 60,000 Afridi in Afghanistan alone. Kieffer, who met many Afridi there as traders, labourers and farmers, thought the real number much smaller and the large figure a product of Kabul's claim to Pashtunistan. [1] All these figures are a century old or more. Kieffer's description of Afridi country as a free zone for the arms trade dates from 1984. [1]