Stanikzai

Elphinstone, writing of the Ghilzai in 1815, divides the Sulaiman Khail into a southern and a northern half. The northern half was the Stauneezyes or Sooltaunzyes and the Ahmedzyes, and he calls the Stauneezyes the more numerous. Later compilers kept his name in the forms Astanazai and Stanizai. The Gazetteer of Afghanistan, in an entry that sets the older authorities side by side, records that Elphinstone counts them a division of the Sulaiman Khel, that Broadfoot implies the same, that Lumsden says nothing either way, and that McMahon does not show them as Sulaiman Khel.

Captain J. A. Robinson, in 1935, gave them a place of their own. He wrote that the Abdulrahimzai and Astanizai (Stanizai) live with the Ahmadzai Sulaiman Khel and are merged in them politically, and that the two tribes are said to descend from a nephew of Ahmad, the ancestor of the Ahmadzai.^1–3

Based on: Colonial records

Elphinstone placed the Stauneezyes in the country north of the Wardaks, where they were farmers. The Gazetteer of Afghanistan, summing up the older authorities, gives them 21 subdivisions living in Logar and Maidan north of the Wardaks, and reports Elphinstone as saying they outnumbered the Ahmadzai. Its compilers guessed about 15,000 families for them, a figure worked out from other tribes' counts, not from a census.

The same gazetteer carries the village records made in the Logar valley in 1880 by the British officers Clifford and Euan Smith, and they show how many Astanazai villages there were. Kuti Khel, nine miles north of Zargan Shahr, held 300 families in twelve detached forts and hamlets. Purak, a group of 17 forts and hamlets two miles south of Tangi Waghjan, had 175 families of Astanazai and 15 of Nasir. Yusuf Kala in the southern division of Logar had 200 families, Shah Mazar near Baraki Rajan 150, Mughal Khel 50, and Fateh Khel and Mangu Khel in the upper valley 100 between them. At the village of Lias Khan, three miles south of Hisarak, the 260 families included three Sayyid hamlets and one of Ahmadzai, the rest Astanazai Ghilzai with a few Mohmands. Smaller places held 10 to 20 families each: Karez-i-Alam, Shad Khana, Sangar Khel, and a hamlet called Hafizulla Kala that had four.

Astanazai villages also lay east of Kabul. The gazetteer records about 120 families of Astanazai Ghilzai at Jagdalak on the Kabul-Jalalabad road, with village lands that were state property, from which the state took half the annual produce. It lists the village of Barina in the Surkhab division of Jalalabad district as Astanazai as well.^2,3

Based on: Colonial records

Robinson listed ten sections: the Painda Khel, Liaz Khel, Shahi Khel, Kuti Khel, Ghafur Khel, Awal Khel, Ismin Khel, Jabbar Khel, Akbar Khel and Asghar Khel. He believed the tribe had others, the Moghal, Pator, Tek, Sang and Chuli Khel. Most of the sections he described were settled on their own land.

The Painda Khel, about 500 families, lived near Chahar Bagh and Besud by Kabul, kept camels and flocks and traded between Kabul and Peshawar in winter. The Liaz Khel (about 300 families) held land about Gardi Kach and Charasia, the Awal Khel (about 140) at Nirkh. The Ismin Khel, about 280 families, were split: about 80 in Nawa and Tsappar in Ningrahar and about 200 at Nirkh and Maidan. The Asghar Khel, about 150 families, were at Dairai, and the Jabbar Khel (about 60) between Paisang and Tora Baba. A few men of the Jabbar, Akbar and Asghar Khel traded between Kabul and Peshawar.¹

Based on: Colonial records

The best-known living member of the tribe is Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, also called Padshah Khan, a Taliban official from Baraki Barak district of Logar. The Middle East Institute's Taliban Leadership Tracker gives his tribe as Stanikzai and says he was born in 1959, the son of Haji Padshah Khan, and was schooled in his home village and in Kabul.

According to the tracker he took a degree in military and security studies at Shimla in India in 1981, then joined the Harakat-i-Inqilab-i-Islami party of Mawlawi Mohammad Nabi Mohammadi in the war against the Soviets, served as a military instructor, and by 1985 was a commander in the south-west. He joined the Taliban in late 1994 and was deputy minister of public health and then deputy foreign minister in their first government.

After 2001 he stayed with the Taliban insurgency. The tracker records him as a senior member and then deputy of the Taliban's political office in Doha in 2014, its head from mid-2015 to early 2019, and one of the movement's main negotiators with the United States until August 2021. In the autumn of 2021 he became deputy foreign minister for political affairs. The United Nations lists him on its sanctions list as TAi.067.⁴

Based on: Reference works