Akora

Akora Khattak, also called Sarai Akora, lies beside the Kabul River in the Nowshera plain. About fifteen kilometres downstream, the Kabul joins the Indus. The Grand Trunk Road crosses this country, and nearby Nowshera guarded routes between Peshawar and the Indus crossing at Attock.

The Khattak lineage gave the settlement its name. Malik Akor Khan Khattak moved the family seat from Teri and built Sarai Akora in the sixteenth century. Mughal emperor Akbar granted him a jagir and the right to collect tolls from travellers who crossed the Indus at Attock. The village then became a hereditary Khattak centre, combining landholding with control of a busy river and road corridor.

Khushal Khattak was born here in 1613. His father’s death made him tribal chief and Mughal mansabdar in 1641. After imprisonment under Aurangzeb, he turned against the Mughals and helped mobilize Pashtun tribes along the Peshawar and Attock routes. His Pashto poetry made the Khattak name famous far beyond the village. He died in 1689 and was buried near Akora.

Akora’s position sustained conflict in the early nineteenth century. In December 1826, Syed Ahmad Barelvi’s largely Pashtun force defeated a larger Sikh army nearby. Even so, the settlement’s importance rested on Khattak landholding, the Attock road, and the Kabul River crossing.