Description

In October 1863, the British Indian army sent a hastily organized campaign to punish the “Sitana Fanatics,” whom the British accused of depredations along the India-Afghanistan border. The fanatics in question, originally Wahhabi Hindustanis from Bengal, had in 1824 established a colony among the Yusufzai tribes of the North-West Frontier to fight Sikh rule. Following the Indian Mutiny (1857–58), they were reinforced by sepoy mutineers, and by 1862 they reestablished themselves around the village of Sitana, near the Mahabun Mountain in the Hindu Kush. The British Indian force, under ...