Sulaiman Khel

The Sulaiman Khel are the largest of the eastern Ghilzai tribes. In the Makhzan-i Afghani, Ibrahim son of Ghilzai had two sons, Haijub and Sahbak, and Haijub had thirteen, the first of them Suleimankhail and the second Alikhail. Bellew puts the tribe in the Isap branch of Burhan, with the Ali Khel and Aka Khel, and lists more than thirty of its sections, among them Ahmad and Jabar. Encyclopaedia Iranica names the Sulaiman Khel, Ali Khel and Taraki as the main eastern Ghilzai tribes.

Elphinstone was told in 1808–1809 that the Sulaiman Khel numbered 30,000 to 35,000 families, far more than any other Ghilzai clan. He divides them into four uluses in two groups. The southern group, the Kaisar Khel and the Shamalzai (or Ismailzai), lived south and east of Ghazni and shared Zurmat with the Ali Khel; each was about five thousand families. The northern group was the Stanizai (or Sultanzai), farmers north of the Wardak country, and the Ahmadzai, herders of eastern Logar, Altamur and Speiga who drove their flocks east to the hills above Jalalabad.^1,3,4,2

Ibbetson records a tradition that in the early years of Akbar's reign (from 1556) the Sulaiman Khel drove the Lohani, a Lodi tribe, out of their homes in Katawaz, and the Lohani crossed the Sulaiman range into Tank. Katawaz, about thirty miles south of Ghazni, was Sulaiman Khel country when Elphinstone wrote.

Elphinstone chose a village of the Kalandar Khel in Katawaz, part of the Shamalzai division, to show how the eastern Ghilzai governed themselves. It held about a hundred families of farmers who owned their land outright and divided it among their children. The khan of the Shamalzai collected the king's dues and did nothing else. The village had two quarters under two headmen, Murad and Faizullah; Murad, as malik, consulted the elders before any step that might lead to war, and mullas settled disputes over property. Among the southern Sulaiman Khel, Elphinstone wrote, quarrels between sections could grow into small wars, while the Ahmadzai obeyed the king and took no part in the Ghilzai rising of 1801–1802.^5,2

Elphinstone calls Azad Khan Sulaiman Khel the most famous Ghilzai since the fall of the Hotak dynasty. He set himself up as a claimant to the Persian throne and was the most dangerous of Karim Khan Zand's rivals; both Persians and Afghans told Elphinstone that the two ended as friends and that Azad lived for years at Karim Khan's court. His son was living in Laghman in Elphinstone's time.

Encyclopaedia Iranica singles out the Sulaiman Khel, and especially the Ahmadzai and Jabar Khel, for their part in Afghan politics. In the First Anglo-Afghan War the Jabar Khel inflicted the heaviest losses on the British army retreating from Kabul to Jalalabad in the winter of 1842. Some Ahmadzai chiefs were prominent during the British operations in south-eastern Afghanistan in 1879–80, and in 1929 the Ahmadzai backed Muhammad Nadir when he took Kabul and made himself king. Najibullah, president of Afghanistan from 1986 to 1992, was an Ahmadzai.^6,4

Ibbetson describes the Sulaiman Khel as the most numerous and powerful of the Ghilzai tribes, holding a tract that ran almost the whole length of the Ghilzai country. Those who traded with India came mainly from the hills east of Ghazni and wintered in the northern trans-Indus tract. They brought little merchandise of their own and worked in large numbers as brokers between the merchants and the other pawindahs. The Imperial Gazetteer of 1908 names the Sulaiman Khel among the Ghilzai who brought the yearly caravans down the Gomal Pass, and the 1901 census counted about 5,000 Sulaiman Khel in Dera Ismail Khan district.^7,8,9