just a reminder from the dusty pages of history

[winterbadger]

I was browsing through Wikipedia this afternoon and a name caught my eye. Back in the day, I remember a scenario of the old SPI game "Patrol" featured British troops trying to track down the Faqir of Ipi. So when I saw that title again, I had to take a look.

Wikipedia's summary of that gentleman's military exploits reads, in part:

The Faqir of Ipi [ born Mirza Ali Khan in 1897] was a Pashtun from today's North-Western Pakistan, then British India. ... The village of Ipi is located ...in North Waziristan Agency, Waziristan, from where the Faqir of Ipi started his self styled jihad against the British government. He waged a highly effective guerrilla warfare against the British Empire throughout the 1930s and 1940s until the British departure in 1947. At one point nearly 40,000 British and Indian troops were reported to be in the field trying to capture him, while he succeeding in evading the tight net surrounding him. His own force of armed tribesmen, probably not exceeding one thousand men, armed with rifles and a few machine-guns, and occasionally one or two pieces of antiquated cannon were fielded against this much larger British army equipped with modern artillery, tanks and aircraft. The Faqir of Ipi was always short of ammunition, had no radio communication, and relied upon a traditional network of informants and messengers for his intelligence while the British had much more sophisticated communications and intelligence capabilities developed in World War II.

As Kipling would probably remind us, nothing much changes in that part of the world.