Fourth skirmish at Hafiz Kor

On 15 November 1916 troops of the 1st (Peshawar) Division once again clashed with the Pashtun Mohmand tribe at Hafiz Kor, in the foothills north of Peshawar. The British chronology of the war calls this clash the “Third Affair of Hafiz Kor”. The British counted smaller “affairs” and larger “actions” separately: the first affair was the one of April 1915, the second the one of October of the same year, while the great victory of 5 September 1915 was counted as an action. Our chronicle numbers all the clashes at this place in sequence, so the November one is the fourth. This time there was no hand-to-hand fighting. The Mohmands were broken up by guns and aircraft, and their gathering dispersed the next day.

The blockade of Mohmand country

After the defeats of 1915 the frontier calmed down for a while, but in 1916 the Mohmands again began to cause trouble and to raid British territory. As a punishment and to prevent further raids, the Indian authorities decided this time not to send an expedition into the mountains but to blockade the tribe’s country. Along its border, from Abazai on the Swat river to Michni on the Kabul river, a chain of blockhouses linked by barbed wire was to be built.

The construction was prepared in secret. On the night of 26 to 27 October the infantry of the Guides from Mardan, with a wing of the 81st Pioneers and the guns of the 24th Mountain Battery, occupied the Khazana Ghund hills on the right bank of the Swat, above the headworks of the Lower Swat Canal. The soldiers carried sandbags, gabions, wire and 120 ready-made barbed-wire trestles up to the ridge, and by dawn had built and wired in six strong posts. According to the regimental history the Mohmands were taken completely by surprise. The same day the 1st and 2nd Infantry Brigades, under Brigadier-General Lionel Dunsterville, later commander of Dunsterforce in Persia, began building fortifications simultaneously along the whole length of the line. For a long time the enemy confined himself to sniping at the workers from cover.

Guns and aircraft

On 13 and 14 November the Mohmands began to gather in the area of Hafiz Kor. The officer in command of the operation, General Sir Frederick Campbell, commander of the 1st Division, who in 1915 had twice routed them at the same place, did not send the infantry into the hills this time. He decided to break up the gathering with artillery fire in cooperation with aircraft. On 15 November the guns, covered by a screen of infantry skirmishers, opened heavy fire, and aircraft of the Royal Flying Corps, flying low, bombed the tribal warriors and strafed them with machine guns. According to the history of the Guides they inflicted heavy losses on them. The sources we have been able to consult give no exact figures. The Guides cavalry, which had arrived from Mardan at Tangi the day before, stood ready but had no chance to charge, as no enemy party dared to come down into the plain.

On 16 November the tribes dispersed to their homes. The clash is regarded as the most important of the whole blockade. It was also a sign of things to come: after the war aircraft became one of the main British weapons in the fighting against the frontier tribes.

Electrified wire

After the Mohmands dispersed, electrified wire was stretched along the whole blockade line, and on 23 November the Guides infantry, which had held the posts on Khazana Ghund the whole time, was sent back to Mardan. The blockade lasted for several more months. In the summer of 1917 the Mohmands submitted and the blockade was lifted.