God's Terrorists

by Charles Allen

  In mid-July 1897 Mullah Sadullah raised his green banner in the Swat valley and summoned the surrounding tribes to arms, much to the anger of the heirs of the late Akhund of Swat, who tried and failed to have him expelled. Little is known about Sadullah’s theological antecedents but he was supported by Sayyed Firoze Shah, head of the Sayyid clan, in pursuit of his bid to have himself proclaimed Padshah of the Swatis like his grandfather before him. The nickname of ‘bare-headed’ given to Sadullah disqualifies him as a Wahhabi, since the latters’ theology required the head to be covered at all times. But the Mad Fakir’s association with a pretender to the throne of Delhi does suggest links with the Hindustani Fanatics. That he had the support of a significant faction of the Hindustanis at Sittana is beyond question, even though their leader Abdullah Ali refused initially to join in Sadullah’s crusade. Many young mujahedeen from the Hindustani camp, easily identified by their distinctive black waistcoats and dark-blue robes, were spotted among the Fakir’s ranks. Their presence prompts the question whence Mullah Sadullah drew his inspiration if not from the legacy of jihad initiated by the first Hindustani Fanatic, Syed Ahmad.

  ‘ Mohmand, Swat and Buner’: map from 1898

  As part of their policy of renewed intervention the British authorities had in 1895 bullied the Swatis into allowing two military forts to be built in their territory, ostensibly to guard the road linking Peshawar with Dir to the north. One outpost stood at a crossing-point of the Swat River at Chakdara, and the second a few miles to the south at Malakand, on the crest of the mountain range overlooking the Vale of Peshawar. The presence of these two forts, manned not by local tribal levies but by regular Indian Army troops with British officers, was regarded by the Swatis as a direct encroachment on their much-vaunted independence – and, no less seriously, as a desecration of Swat as a dar ul-Islam. Consequently, when the Mad Fakir issued his summons thousands of Swatis ignored the advice of their khans and flocked to join his banner. On 21 July 1897 Mullah Sadullah prophesied that by the rising of the new moon in ten days’ time the British would have been driven out of Malakand. Five days later two lashkars (tribal armies) marched on the forts of Chakdara and Malakand.

  At Malakand the last chukka of an afternoon of polo was being played when the grooms attending the officers’ ponies were warned by watching Pathans to get off home as there was to be a fight. Shortly afterwards Lieutenant Harry Rattray was riding back from the polo ground to Chakdara, where the regiment raised by his father was on garrison duty, when he met two cavalry troopers galloping the other way. They told him that a tribal army was advancing on Malakand down the left bank of the Swat River with banners flying and drums beating. Rattray put spurs to his horse and rode right through them to reach his post at Chakdara, from where he sent a telegram to Major Harold Deane, the political agent at Malakand, warning him of the danger.

  Deane at once advised the local commander to prepare for an attack and to telegraph Hoti Mardan for immediate reinforcements. This prompt action saved both garrisons from annihilation. The message was received in the Guides headquarters at 8.30 p.m. and five hours later, fed, rested and armed, a relief column set off to cover the thirty-two miles to Malakand.

  As darkness fell on 26 July both camps at Malakand and Chakdara came under fire. Throughout the night one assault followed another as wave after wave of tribesmen attempted to break through their defences. Just before dawn a squadron of Guides Cavalry came trotting up the road from the plain to the Malakand fort, followed soon afterwards by the 11th Bengal Lancers. They took the pressure off the defenders and a counterattack reclaimed some of the positions lost in the night. At 5 p.m. that same afternoon the main relief force of Guides Infantry and two battalions of Sikh and Dogra infantry arrived at Malakand, having marched right through the heat of the day at a cost of twenty-one deaths from sunstroke and apoplexy. Despite these reinforcements the defenders continued to be pressed hard for three days and nights, culminating in a massed onslaught on the night of 29 July in which in excess of ten thousand tribesmen took part. ‘Bands of Ghazis,’ wrote Lieutenant P. C. Elliott-Lockhart of the Guides Infantry, ‘worked up by their religious enthusiasm into a frenzy of fanatical excitement, would charge our breastworks again and again, leaving their dead in scores after each repulse, while the standard bearers would encourage their efforts by shouting, with much beating of tom-toms, and other musical instruments.’

  In this attack Mullah Sadullah, the Mad Fakir, was slightly wounded and a number of his supporters were killed, including his second-in-command and another leader described as his ‘close companion’. Today a well-preserved tomb can be seen beside the Malakand road. According to local oral tradition, it covers the grave of Hazrat Sikander Shah Shaheed, Honourable King Alexander the Martyr, who is said to have flown a red and white banner at the battle. This may well be the grave of the young Sikandar Shah, supposed grandson of the Mughal Prince Feroze Shah, of whom nothing more was ever heard.

  A mullah rallies his mujahedeen at Malakand: a detail from the charge of the 13th (Duke of Connaught’s) Bengal Lancers at Shabkadar, August 1897, a watercolour (now lost) painted by Major Edmond Hobday, who fought in the engagement (National Army Museum)

  A scene from the great Frontier uprising of 1897–8: Sikh infantry face a charge from Swati tribesmen at Malakand. A watercolour by Major Edmond Hobday (National Army Museum)

  British and Indian troops defend Chakdara Fort against Swati tribesmen in a night attack: a watercolour by Major Edmond Hobday, who was present at the engagement (National Army Museum)

  The famous charge of the Gordon Highlanders to retake the Dargai Heights on 20 October 1897 during the Tirah Campaign (Mary Evans Picture Library)

  A Pathan tribal lashkar come forward under their khan to make their submissions to a British political officer at the conclusion of the shortlived Third Afghan War of 1919 (Charles Allen)

  The ruins of Dariyah, first capital of the al-Saud dynasty, photographed by Harry St John Philby in 1917–18 (Royal Geographical Society)

  The Emir of Nejd and Imam of the Ikhwan, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, with his brothers and sons, photographed by Captain Shakespear when he joined his camp near Thaj in 1911 (Royal Geographical Society)

  The former British political officer Harry St John Philby shortly after his supposed conversion to Wahhabi Islam in Mecca in September 1930 (Royal Geographical Society)

  British diplomats present Ibn Saud with the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath in Riyadh in 1935. Behind the King stand the heir-apparent, Prince Saud, and Ibn Saud’s favourite son, Prince Feisal. Photography was forbidden but the assistant consul, Captain de Gaury, made a sketch of the scene in his notebook. His accompanying note explains that the wearing of Arab dress for foreigners was obligatory (Royal Society of Asian Affairs)

  The one-eyed Mullah Muhammad Omar appears on a rooftop in Kandahar draped in the cloak of the Prophet in April 1996 before being acclaimed Amir-ul-Momineen of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. A rare photograph taken by the veteran television cameraman Peter Lorimer (Peter Lorimer/Frontline/Getty)

  Armed Taliban near Kabul, 1996 (Hurriyet/AP/Empics)

  The madrassah of Dar ul-Ulum Deoband in India as it is today. Founded by two Wahhabi survivors of the 1857 uprising, it has become the headquarters of a fundamentalist teaching that now extends to thirty thousand madrassahs worldwide (David Bathgate/Corbis)

  Taliban in a classroom at Dar ul-Ulum Deoband madrassah. At the core of Deobandi teaching is the Hadith and Tawhid, the oneness of God (David Bathgate/Corbis)

  The emir of Al-Qaeda and his wazir: Osama bin Laden, also known as ‘Al-Shaykh’, with the man widely viewed as his lieutenant but more accurately described as his ideologue, Dr Ayman al-Zawahri. Taken from a video released by Al-Jazeera in October 2001 (AP/Empics)

  The Wahhabi–Ahl-i-Hadith–Deobandi axis: leaders of Pakistan’s main Islamist political parties at a rally in Rawalpindi in August 2003. In 2001 they united to form the Muttahida Majlis-I-Amal (MMA
) or United Action Front, which today governs the North-West Frontier Province, reintroducing Wahhabi sharia and lending tacit support to the Taliban. In the centre is Shah Ahmed Noorani of JUP, flanked by the burly Maulana Fazal-ur-Rahman of JUI(F) and the white-bearded Qazi Hussain Ahmad of JI. Beside the Qazi is Maulana Samiul Haq of JUI(S) (Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images)

  After this setback the main focus of attack shifted from Malakand to the smaller and more vulnerable garrison guarding the bridge at Chakdara, held by two hundred men of Rattray’s Sikhs, many of them sons and grandsons of the men who had served with Thomas Rattray through the Mutiny. For six days they were invested by a force of not less than seven thousand men supported by about two hundred standard-bearers – together presenting, in the opinion of a cavalry officer who saw them, ‘a very fine spectacle. The advance was made by their usual rushes and accompanied by their well-known maniacal shouts. Their standard-bearers, leading parties from cover to cover, worked their way up under the walls, where the steady fire of our Sikhs repelled all attacks.’

  Although the telegraph line had been cut, communications with Malakand and the outside world were maintained by a signaller named Sepoy Prem Singh, who regularly crawled out under fire to an exposed tower to flash brief messages with his heliograph. On 2 August, by which time the garrison had been without water for three days, he sent his last signal, brief and to the point: ‘Help us.’ On the following day the Malakand Field Force, consisting of three full brigades under the command of a no-nonsense Anglo-Irish general named Bindon Blood, pushed on through Malakand to Chakdara, and all resistance collapsed.

  The refusal of the Mad Fakir’s heavenly host to come to their aid turned the Swatis against him and he slipped away as mysteriously as he had appeared. The heads of the tribes duly came in under white flags to make their submissions to Major Deane, explaining that they had been misled and professing their unswerving loyalty to the Government. Once the immediate area had been secured the Malakand Field Force moved on in search of the Mad Fakir and his adherents, the main column under Blood marching eastwards into Buner country to strike at what was believed to be the home of the Mad Fakir, the Sayyeds of Sittana and the last of the Hindustani Fanatics. Yet when General Blood’s force reached the heights looking down on the Chumla valley and the scene of the Ambeyla campaign thirty-four years earlier its commander called a halt and, after several days of inaction, turned about.

  Lieutenant Winston Churchill, nominally on leave from his regiment but ‘embedded’ with Blood’s field force as a special correspondent representing The Pioneer and the Daily Telegraph, was furious at this decision, as were many of his fellow officers. ‘The Government shrank from the risk,’ Churchill fulminated. ‘The Malakand Field Force thus remained idle for nearly a fortnight. The news, that the Sirkar [Government] had feared to attack Buner, spread like wildfire along the frontier, and revived the spirits of the tribes. They fancied they detected a sign of weakness. Nor were they altogether wrong . . . The opportunity of entering the country without having to force the passes may not recur.’ As young Winston feared, no further opportunity to finish the business presented itself and so, once again, the Fanatic Camp survived.

  But Churchill was wrong to assume that the authorities had lost their nerve. The Mad Fakir had not fled to Buner country, as was believed, but had travelled westwards, crossing the Swat River to enter the country of the Mohmands. In the village of Jarobi he met an elderly cleric considered so sacred to the Mohmands that no one dared breathe his real name, Najb-ud-din, but knew him simply as the Mullah of Haddah. The Haddah Mullah had long been a thorn in the flesh of the Amir of Afghanistan and a decade earlier had raised the Mohmands against him. However, Abdur Rahman had since recognised the scope of the Haddah Mullah’s influence and had gone to great lengths to woo him, even to the extent of acknowledging him as a Light of Islam.

  On 7 August the Mohmands rose in revolt under the Haddah Mullah, descended on the Hindu village of Shankargarh on the edge of the Vale of Peshawar and then advanced on the bazaar of Shabkadr, killing and plundering as they went. The smoke from the burning villages was seen from Peshawar, and retribution was swift. Churchill followed General Blood’s punitive column as it set about bringing the Mohmands to heel, a task made immensely frustrating by the enemy’s tactics of melting away before the advancing column and then attacking from the heights as it withdrew, always striking at a vulnerable point. In one such withdrawal Churchill very nearly lost his life, and afterwards reflected on the difficulties facing a modern army equipped with advanced weaponry when it sought to get to grips with a less well-armed but determined enemy in hostile terrain. ‘The actual casualties’, he wrote, ‘were, in proportion to the numbers engaged, greater than in any action of the British army in India for many years. Out of a force which at no time exceeded 1000 men, nine British officers, four native officers, and 136 soldiers were either killed or wounded.’ He attended the hurried burials of several of his brother officers: ‘Looking at these shapeless forms, coffined in a regulation blanket, the pride of race, the pomp of empire, the glory of war appeared but the faint and unsubstantial fabric of a dream; and I could not help realising with Burke, “What shadows we are and what shadows we pursue.”’

  Within a fortnight the Mohmand uprising was over, and the tribal elders had come forward to tender their submissions and to declare that they had fought only because they had been told they faced annexation. But already the revolt had spread. ‘The “fiery cross” had roused all to arms,’ wrote Woosnam Mills, correspondent of the Lahore newspaper The Civil and Military Gazette. ‘The first sign of the further spreading of the revolt was the disquieting news from Peshawar that a simultaneous rising had been arranged between the Orakzais and the Afridis, two of the most powerful and warlike of our frontier neighbours.’ Whether or not the Mad Fakir was implicated, as was widely believed, three weeks after the start of the Swat uprising and ten days after the beginning of the Mohmand revolt, the third phase of the frontier uprising began with Said Akbar, Akhundzada of the Akakhel Afridis, advancing down the Khyber at the head of fifteen hundred mullahs and ten thousand Afridis.

  After the garrison of the first of the chain of forts strung along the Khyber Pass had been massacred to a man the remaining tribal levies declared themselves for Said Akbar. The Afridi lashkars then advanced unopposed to Fort Jamrud, the great fortress which sprawls rather than stands at the mouth of the Khyber – whereupon the entire country of Tirah to the south rose in support, bringing with them another forty to fifty thousand fighting men of the Orakzai and southern Afridi tribes.

  The authorities responded with alacrity, and in strength. ‘Never had our frontier prestige been so menaced,’ wrote Woosnam Mills:

  Never had our authority been so daringly set aside. Plunder and rapine ravaged from Ali Masjid to Landi Kotal. Insane exultancy prevailed among the frontiersmen . . . Can we be surprised if the Pathan, with his inordinate vanity and religious fanaticism, imagined that the Mussulman millennium was near at hand, that the days of the British Raj were numbered, and that the ‘people of God’ were once more to come into their inheritance and rule in the land of Hindustan as Conquerors.

  The Tirah Expeditionary Force was the largest army raised in India since the dark days of the Indian Mutiny, made up of forty thousand fighting men. Commanded by General Sir William Lockhart, who had three decades of frontier campaigning under his Sam Browne belt, it became the first foreign army to break the purdah of Tirah, the wild country abutting the Safed Koh range (today a sanctuary for Osama bin Laden’s ‘Arabs’). This was hostile territory with a vengeance, ‘only to be approached by perilous passes and dark ravines, and only to be traversed via a network of rocky fastnesses, wooded heights, rushing torrents and dangerous defiles – a country, in short, abounding in natural defensive advantages, and full of risks to the invader, hampered as he must be, by an immense transport train, carrying supplies, baggage, hospitals, ammunition, and so forth.’

  Lockh
art’s strategy was straightforward: to enter the Orakzai country from the south and then strike north to reach ‘the hub and heart of the Afridi nation . . . in three or four easy marches’ before pushing on to reclaim the Khyber Pass. By attacking from the south he hoped to prevent the uprising spreading to Waziristan, where Mullah Powindah of the Mahsuds was already doing his best to foment jihad.

  On 18 October Lockhart began his campaign with a frontal assault by the Gordon Highlanders to take the commanding heights of a five-thousand-foot ridge called Dargai. The attack was only lightly opposed and the heights were taken. The position was found to be well-nigh impregnable, consisting as it did of a series of cliffs running along both sides of an extended ridge that could only be approached across open ground offering very little cover. Yet no sooner had the Gordons taken Dargai Heights than they were withdrawn, on the grounds that insufficient supplies had been brought up to allow the position to be held. By the time the delayed supplies had arrived the ridge had been reoccupied by the Afridis, this time in strength. ‘There can be little doubt,’ commented the correspondent of The Civil and Military Gazette, ‘that the tribesmen looked upon our abandonment of Dargai – the impregnability of which they fully realised – as, to say the very least of it, a great tactical mistake . . . The tribesmen attributed the abandonment of Dargai by our troops to the prayers of their holy men.’ Fifteen standards were counted, suggesting that the ridge was now manned by between two and two and a half thousand men. To make matters worse, many of the enemy bore modern rifled weapons in the form of breech-loading Sniders, muzzle-loading Enfields and a number of the British troops’ own Lee-Metfords, captured or stolen.