Talk:Tirah
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Tirah treats Tirah as a cannabis growing area: Afridi Tirah round Tirah Maidan, with the Orakzai uplands to the south, in Khyber and Orakzai districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. It covers the tract's geography, the making of charas there, its legal status and the seed collections named for it. The districts are treated at Khyber District and Orakzai District.
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Discussion
Why Tirah is a growing area
- Hamayun and Shinwari (2004) state that cannabis has been cultivated in Afridi Tirah for hundreds of years and that charas is made there in large quantities. Only the published abstract was available. The article cites it only for what the abstract says, and nothing from the body of the paper.
- Siddique (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 2012) describes cannabis grown on terraced fields on Tirah Maidan and the making and ageing of its charas.
- Sharif and Ullah (2026) interviewed cannabis growers in Upper, Central and Lower Orakzai, among them farmers who had grown the crop for eight to 22 years.
- The Associated Press of Pakistan (8 May 2026) reports a meeting between the Cannabis Control and Regulatory Authority and elders from the Tirah Valley about "traditional cannabis cultivation" and the rights of its growers.
- The status is Active: the 2012 report, the 2026 study and the May 2026 meeting all describe cultivation since 2000.
Extent and border
- The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica defines Tirah as the valleys round the source of the Bara River, between the Khyber Pass and the Khanki valley. It names five chief valleys: Maidan, Rajgul, Waran, Bara and the Orakzai valley of Mastura in the southern half. It puts the area at about 600 to 700 square miles (1,550 to 1,800 km²) and its people as the Afridi and Orakzai tribes.
- The map border is approximate. It is drawn on two present-day administrative units: Tirah Tehsil of Khyber District and the whole of Orakzai District. Together they cover about 1,670 km², close to the 1911 figure. The tehsil holds Tirah Maidan, and Orakzai District is where the 2026 interviews were held.
- The border does not match the 1911 tract exactly. The upper Bara valley round Dwatoi lies in Bara Tehsil, which reaches down to the Peshawar plain, and is left out. Orakzai District reaches south and east to the Khanki side, which the 1911 text puts outside Tirah.
- The area figure in the infobox is rounded from the border.
Sources
- Geography. The 1911 Britannica article is used for the extent of the tract, the heights of Maidan and Mastura and the seasonal movement of the Afridis and Orakzais. It was read in the Wikisource transcription of volume 26, p. 1005. It was written after the 1897 campaign; its description of the people is not used.
- Orakzai District. The area, terrain and 2018 merger come from Sharif and Ullah (2026), p. 134.
- Cultivation. Sharif and Ullah's interviews (pp. 138-140) are used for what their respondents said about growing cannabis in Orakzai. The acreage figures in their introduction (about 35,000 acres in the former tribal districts, 28,600 of them in Orakzai, from a 2021 provincial survey) are not used. Neither is the national revenue figure. Those figures come from works the paper cites that could not be traced, and two other references in its list could not be found in the citation databases.
- Accession. The seed collection is described from the seller's listing.
Sources not used
- Hussain and colleagues (2020) published a weed survey of cannabis fields at Kalona, Zangai and Kawarli in Tirah Maidan (Pakistan Journal of Weed Science Research 26(2), doi:10.28941/pjwsr.v26i2.837). It could not be read: the journal's host blocks automated access, and the citation databases disagree on its volume.
- Reports in The Express Tribune (2013) and The Washington Post (on growers displaced from the valley by military operations) were seen only in reprints and are not cited.
- A United Nations report of 2006 says that Afghan cannabis was processed in the Orakzai, Kurram and Tirah areas. It speaks of processing, not cultivation, and is not used for this page.
- Seed lots deposited in the United States genebank under the names Tirah (6F) to Tirah (TV) are not treated as Tirah collections: the donor's own note questions whether they came from Tirah.