Khwazak

The Khwazak belong to the Sulaiman Khel, the largest tribe of the eastern Ghilzai. In the Afghan genealogy of the Makhzan-i Afghani, Ghilzai's son Ibrahim had a son Haijub, and Haijub's thirteen sons include Suleimankhail and Alikhail. The Makhzan does not name the Khwazak.

Captain J. A. Robinson, who collected the nomad tribes of eastern Afghanistan in the early 1930s, counted four divisions of the Sulaiman Khel: the Ahmadzai, Shamal Khel, Kaisar Khel and Khwazak. He wrote that the last three, with their relations the Ali Khel and Aka Khel, were commonly called simply Sulaiman Khel by themselves and others, while the Ahmadzai stood somewhat outside that alliance. Mountstuart Elphinstone, a century earlier, divided the tribe into four other groups and did not name the Khwazak, so the name may have come into use later or been counted under another heading.^1,4,5

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Robinson described the Khwazak as a well-to-do tribe, nearly all nomadic except for the sections settled on their land in Koh-i-Daman. They spent the summer in the Hazarajat and Zurmat and the winter in the Lakki tahsil of Bannu District, with a few in Dera Ismail Khan District. He added that they had formerly enjoyed a wide reputation as robbers and freebooters and in his time seemed more peaceful. That is his judgement, written in 1935.

The British gazetteer of Kabul and south-eastern Afghanistan, reprinted by Adamec, lists Machalgu in Zurmat, a large and fertile village of forts and hamlets about 17 miles north-east of Gardez on the road to Kurram, as inhabited by Khwazaks.

Robinson's example of a Khwazak section's year is the Moza Khel of the Saqi Khel: about 30 families, nomadic with little land, who summered at Quakh and Khatawa in Gardez and wintered in the Lakki tahsil of Bannu. They carried dried fruit, ghi, almonds, pistachio nuts, woollen durries and carpets to Bannu for sale, and some families went on to the Punjab to hire out camels. They took back cloth, shoes, boots, saddles, tea and sugar bought in the Punjab and at Cawnpore.^1,2

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Robinson lists the Khwazak sections as the Shakhal Khel, with the Ningraharai (Momin Khel and Jawal Khel), the Saqi Khel (Moza, Batu and Pak Khel) and the Wadat Khel (Sadiq, Qadar and Bahadur Khel), and the Mirza Khel, with the Mirza Khel proper, the Landian, the Amin Khel or Wali Khel, the Kota Khel and the Atak Khel. He noted that the Ningraharai were at feud with the other Shakhal Khel sections.

Some sections were settled. The Qadar Khel (about 30 families) and the Mirza Khel proper (about 40) had their land at Khakran in the Hazarajat, and most of the Landian (about 60 families) were settled there too; the rest of the Landian wintered in Lakki. Of the Ahmad Khel or Wali Khel Robinson wrote that these sections were gradually dying out, but the printed text of that passage is incomplete.¹

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