Turi

The Khulasat al-Ansab and Caroe count the Turi as Karlanri, through Khoghi (Khugiani); Ibbetson records the same claim, to descent from Khugiani son of Kakai, while Bellew places them under Kodai. Other writers doubted the genealogy. Ibbetson called the Turi of doubtful origin, perhaps of Awan stock, and said they had once been hamsaya of the Bangash and had risen against them. The Imperial Gazetteer of 1908 calls them a tribe of Turkish origin who speak Pashto and now rank as Pathans. Raverty linked them to the Turkmens who held the country round Ghazni and Kurram in the twelfth century; Caroe found this doubtful, since the Turi sit in the middle of the Karlanri tribes and show nothing of a Turkish appearance.

Bellew gives five clans, known together as the Panjpadri, the five fathers: the Gundi, Ali, Mastu, Sarghali and Dopa. He reckoned the tribe at 10,000 families, all Shia, and described their country as once reaching Torawari in Miranzai and west of the Peiwar ridge to the head of the Kurram, where the Ali clan gave its name to the Alikhel tract later held by the Jaji.^1,2,3,4,5,6

Kurram was Upper Bangash in Babur's day and under Akbar, and Babur already mentions the Turi among its tribes. Its Karlanri tribes followed Pir Roshan, and the Mughals held the valley only loosely through their faujdars at Kohat. By the time the Mughal empire broke up and Kurram passed to Afghanistan, the Turi had overcome the Bangash of the valley, and the Bangash who stayed became their clients. Ibbetson puts the Turi and Jaji conquest of Kurram soon after the Bangash arrived in the fourteenth century; Balland dates the Turi gain of upper Kurram to the eighteenth.

Elphinstone, whose information dates from 1809, places the Turi west of Upper Bangash in the same valley, independent of the Kabul king, and notes with surprise that they were Shia, as were many of the Upper Bangash. The Jaji further up the valley were, he wrote, their inveterate enemies.^4,5,6,7,8

After the British annexed Kohat the Turi raided the Miranzai border. An agreement was made with them in 1854, and in 1856 a force under Brigadier-General Neville Chamberlain entered the valley and exacted Rs 8,630 in compensation, guaranteed by the Afghan governor Ghulam Jan. In 1859 the Turi joined the British expedition against the Kabul Khel Wazirs. In 1877 they revolted against the Afghan governor Shahbaz Khan when the amir demanded Rs 50,000, a poll tax of Rs 5 on every adult man, and 6,000 recruits for his war; they fled to the hills until a jirga went to Kabul and the governor was recalled.

In November 1878 General Roberts entered Kurram from Thal, and on 2 December defeated the Afghan army at the Peiwar Kotal. The Turi supplied his force, escorted convoys and, with the Bangash, asked the British to take over the valley, which Yaqub Khan ceded by the treaty of Gandamak in 1879. The British left in October 1880 and declared the tribe independent. From 1882 to 1884 the Turi fought among themselves and with the Jaji and Zaimusht, and Caroe notes that their Shia faith, among Sunni neighbours, gave the fighting a sectarian colour. At the Turis' own request the British took over the administration in 1892, and Parachinar, first occupied in 1893, became the headquarters of the Kurram Agency.^5,6

Under British rule cases in Kurram were settled by the Political Agent according to the Turizuna, the unwritten customary law of the Turi, which the maliks were expected to know. At the census of 1901 the Agency had 54,257 people, of whom nearly 12,000 were Turi, the largest Pathan tribe there. The gazetteer notes grants for the upkeep of shrines and of the matam kotahs, the Shia mourning houses, and names the Turi with some Kurram Bangash and many Orakzai as the Shia of the province.

Kurram remained a tribal agency after 1947 and was part of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas until the Twenty-fifth Amendment, signed on 31 May 2018, merged the tribal areas into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.^5,9