History  

Hazara Soldiers in World War I: The Forgotten Regiments of the British Indian Army

Search the standard histories of the First World War and you will not find the Hazara Pioneers. Search the memorials, the commemorative programs, the centenary exhibitions that ran across Europe from 2014 to 2018 - the same absence. Search within Hazara community memory, and the absence compounds: a regiment raised from Hazara refugees, serving on three continents, returning after years of hard service, and then quietly disappearing from all collective recollection as though it had never existed.

The 106th Hazara Pioneers was a real unit. It was raised in 1904 at Quetta from Hazara men who had fled persecution in Afghanistan. It sent companies to the Western Front in France, to Persia and Sistan, to the Northwest Frontier, and to Mesopotamia. It served for nearly two decades, built roads and railways in the rubble of the Ottoman Empire, and sent home men decorated for gallantry in the field. Sixty of its soldiers are recorded by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission as having died in service. Their names are carved into memorials in Basra, Baghdad, Tehran, Delhi, and France.

Almost none of this appears in the history books. This article is an attempt to recover the record.

The World Those Soldiers Came From

To understand who joined the 106th Hazara Pioneers, you have to understand what had just happened to the Hazara people in Afghanistan. In the late nineteenth century, the Amir Abdur Rahman Khan launched a series of suppression campaigns against Hazarajat - the central highlands where most Hazaras lived - that were among the most violent episodes in Afghan history. The rebellions of 1888, 1891-1892, and 1893 were met with systematic destruction. Villages were burned, leaders executed, and large numbers of Hazaras were reduced to bonded labor or enslaved. The human costs were catastrophic. Those who could flee, did.

Many fled south and east into British India. Quetta, the garrison city in Balochistan, became a place of settlement. Hazara men who arrived there found work as quarry workers and laborers - physically demanding, economically precarious, but safer than what they had left. They were recognizable in the city's streets by the early 1900s as a distinct community, speaking Dari, practicing Shia Islam in a predominantly Sunni region, carrying the particular watchfulness of people who had survived dispossession.

It was from this refugee population that the British raised the 106th Hazara Pioneers.

To learn more about the history of Hazara persecution that produced this refugee wave, see Who Are the Hazara and How the Hazara Became Shi'a.

The Formation of the Regiment

In 1904, Lord Kitchener - then Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army - ordered Major C. W. Jacob to raise a new battalion from the Hazara population at Quetta. Jacob, who would later become Field Marshal Sir Claud Jacob, drew his founding nucleus from Hazara soldiers already serving in the 124th Duchess of Connaught's Own Baluchistan Infantry and the 126th Baluchistan Infantry. Both regiments had maintained two companies of Hazara soldiers each, a clear indication that the British had already found Hazara men reliable enough to build on.

The timing was not coincidental. The influx of Hazara refugees into Quetta in 1903-1904 - itself a delayed consequence of Abdur Rahman's campaigns - created both the need and the supply. Large numbers of Hazara men were present, available, and motivated. Military service offered something the quarry could not: income, status, institutional protection, and a form of belonging. For men who had been driven out of their country and dispossessed of most of what they had, a uniform and a regiment offered something solid to stand on.

The new regiment was designated the 106th Hazara Pioneers. It was organized into eight companies and established its permanent peace station at Quetta Cantonment. It was, by design and from its first day, the only unit in the British Indian Army recruited exclusively from Hazara nationals.

This origin matters. The 106th was not created by the ordinary logic of imperial military expansion. It was created, at least in part, by catastrophe - by the violence of one state against a minority, which drove that minority into the arms of a colonial power that found them useful. The men who filled the regiment's ranks in 1904 were, in many cases, themselves survivors of the Abdur Rahman campaigns or the sons of survivors. They enlisted in a foreign army because the country of their birth had tried to destroy them.

What Pioneers Did

The word "pioneer" in the British Indian Army carried a specific and demanding meaning. Pioneer regiments were dual-function units: trained as infantry and equipped as engineers. Every sepoy in a pioneer regiment carried both a rifle and either a pickaxe or a light spade. They were the men who built the infrastructure of war - the roads, the railways, the trenches, the defensive works without which modern armies cannot move or fight.

This work was unglamorous and physically brutal. On the Western Front, pioneers dug and improved trenches largely at night, under fire, in mud. In Mesopotamia, they drove railway lines through landscapes of rock and sand where temperatures in summer exceeded fifty degrees Celsius. On the Northwest Frontier, they cut roads through mountain passes where a wrong step meant a several-hundred-foot fall. None of this work produced the kind of narrative that made its way into regimental histories or commemorative speeches.

But pioneer regiments were also trained infantry. They could fight when required, and they were expected to defend themselves and their work. The 106th was not a labor battalion of unarmed laborers - it was a regiment of soldiers who built things and fought when they had to.

France: The Western Front

When war broke out in August 1914, the British Indian Army mobilized rapidly. By September of that year, Indian regiments were arriving at Marseilles, among them the 107th Pioneers, which joined the 9th (Sirhind) Brigade of the 3rd (Lahore) Division.

One company from the 106th Hazara Pioneers was detached to serve with the 107th Pioneers. This company arrived in France around May 1915. Their work there was the standard labor of the Western Front pioneer: constructing and improving the trench systems that had calcified along the line from the Channel to the Swiss border, working at night, in conditions that bore no resemblance to anything the men had encountered in Balochistan or on the Afghan frontier.

Two Hazara soldiers died in France. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission records confirm their deaths, though the specific memorials or cemeteries where they are commemorated have not been identified in the available sources. They are among the dead of that front, their names entered into the same registers as the hundreds of thousands of others who fell in the mud of Flanders and Picardy.

The company remained with the 107th Pioneers until that regiment returned from France in late 1916 and subsequently proceeded to Mesopotamia.

Persia and Sistan

While one company was in France, the main body of the 106th was deployed on a very different mission, thousands of miles to the southeast. In 1915-1916, the regiment served with the Kalat Column in Sistan - the desolate border region where the frontiers of Persia, Afghanistan, and British India converged.

The column operated under Brigadier-General R. E. Dyer, an officer who would later become infamous for ordering the Amritsar Massacre in 1919. In Sistan, however, his mission was preventing enemy infiltration from Persia into Afghanistan - a strategic concern in a war where both sides were attempting to bring Afghanistan onto their side. The regiment's work included operations against Damani tribal sections in the Gusht area in July 1916.

Two soldiers of the 106th died in Persia. Their names are commemorated at the Tehran Memorial, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission's record for British Empire servicemen who died in Iran. That memorial stands today in Tehran, largely unknown to the general public, holding among its inscriptions the names of Hazara men who died far from both their homeland and the regiment's base at Quetta.

Mesopotamia: The Long Deployment

The most substantial chapter of the regiment's First World War service played out in Mesopotamia - the campaign fought in what is now Iraq against Ottoman forces, one of the bloodiest and most logistically demanding theaters of the entire war.

The regiment's involvement began with a single detached company in 1917, assigned to work with the 128th Pioneers on the Baghdad-Samarra railway and the construction of defences at Baquba. This deployment was a precursor to what followed.

On 22 February 1918, the full regiment embarked at Quetta on the troopship HT Barala. Five days later, on 27 February, they arrived at Basra. The regiment joined the 18th Indian Division and moved north up the Tigris, above Baghdad. From there it was transferred to II Corps, where its primary work became driving the railway line through the Jabal Hamrin - a range of rocky hills northeast of Baghdad, through which a railway was needed to extend the supply lines supporting further operations toward Mosul.

The armistice of November 1918 ended the fighting but did not end the regiment's deployment. Mesopotamia in 1919 and 1920 was not at peace. The British were building an administrative and infrastructural presence in a territory that would become the British Mandate of Iraq. Pioneer regiments were the people who built that presence.

The 106th spent three years after the armistice in Mesopotamia and Iraq. In 1919, they worked on the Shergat-Mosul line of communications and participated in the Kurdistan campaign in the autumn. In 1920, they continued work on the same line. In 1921, they constructed a road along the western bank of the Tigris from Shergat south to Baji. On 16 August 1921, nearly three and a half years after they had arrived at Basra, the regiment finally returned to Quetta.

Thirty-three Hazara soldiers are commemorated on the Basra Memorial in Iraq - men who died in Mesopotamia and have no known grave. One additional soldier is buried at the Baghdad War Cemetery. The Basra Memorial is a large stone structure on the edge of the Shatt al-Arab waterway, built to hold the names of those who died in Mesopotamia and whose bodies were never recovered or identified. For a Hazara community in Quetta that has largely forgotten this chapter of its history, thirty-three names are inscribed on a monument in a city nine hundred kilometers away.

The Northwest Frontier

Between the Persia and Mesopotamia deployments, the regiment served on the Northwest Frontier in 1917, working on the Mohmand Blockade Line. This was the kind of deployment that filled most of the Indian Army's peacetime and wartime years on the frontier - engineering work, garrison duty, maintaining British control of movement across the Afghan border. It was not a campaign that produced distinguished-service citations or dramatic narratives. It was the ordinary grind of imperial boundary maintenance.

The Soldiers Themselves

The war diary of the 106th Hazara Pioneers is held at the National Archives in Kew, under reference WO 95/5222/8. It covers 15 February 1918 to 30 April 1920. A researcher who could read it would find daily entries recording the regiment's movements, its work, its casualties, the decisions of its officers, and - if the diary is detailed enough - the names of men cited for particular actions.

That diary has not been systematically read or published. What exists in the public record is fragmentary but real.

The Imperial War Museum's Lives of the First World War database holds approximately 485 individual records for soldiers of the 106th Hazara Pioneers. The names in that database read like a catalogue of the community the regiment drew from: Jan Ali, Ali, Dad Ali, Akbar Ali, Asghar Ali, Muhammad Ali, Baksh Ali, Juma Ali, Hussain Ali, Nazar Ali. Sepoys, Lance Naiks, Naiks, Jemadars - the rank structure of the Indian Army running from private to native officer. They are accessible at the IWM's public database for anyone who wants to search them.

The casualty records preserved by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the A Street Near You database document sixty men who died during the war. The CWGC records are specific about where those men are commemorated: 33 at the Basra Memorial in Iraq; 21 at the Delhi Memorial (India Gate) in India; 2 at the Tehran Memorial in Iran; 1 at the Baghdad War Cemetery in Iraq; 2 at French locations.

Among those sixty, some names survive in the casualty record. Sepoy Quarban Ali, regimental number 2796, died on 4 August 1914 - the very first day of the war, before the regiment had deployed anywhere. The circumstances of his death on that date are unknown. Havildar Ali Jan, number 288, died on 18 February 1915. Captain Elmes Pollock Henderson, a British officer serving with the regiment, died on 29 June 1916, at the height of the Sistan operations. Major Richard Henry Hedges Manners died on 29 November 1919, in the post-armistice period in Mesopotamia.

These are not profiles. They are data points - the minimum the historical record has preserved of men who served and died. Behind each name is a life that the available archives have not reconstructed.

The regiment's commanding officer and founder, Major C. W. Jacob, remained closely associated with the unit for his entire career. He served as colonel of the regiment from 1916 until its disbandment in 1933. He ended his career as Field Marshal Sir Claud Jacob, one of the most senior officers in the British Army. The regiment he raised from refugees in Quetta in 1904 was, by any assessment, the work that defined his early career.

The regiment was also - by the available evidence - an exceptional one. According to Brigadier-General B. L. St. Pierre Bunbury's regimental history, held at the British Library, "In rifle shooting, the Hazara Pioneers were the best regiment in the entire Indian Army." The regiment won the King Emperor's Cup and the Meerut Cup repeatedly. Two players were selected for the Indian national hockey team's tour to New Zealand in 1926. The sources confirm that several Indian Orders of Merit and a number of Indian Distinguished Service Medals and Indian Meritorious Service Medals were awarded to Hazara soldiers for gallantry in the field. These were not marginal soldiers performing marginal service.

The Disbandment

The regiment returned to Quetta in August 1921 and continued its service under a sequence of redesignations: it became the 1st Battalion, 4th Pioneers in 1922, then The Hazara Pioneers in 1929. These name changes reflected the broader reorganization of the Indian Army's pioneer corps in the postwar years.

The end came on 31 March 1933. The regiment was disbanded - the last pioneer regiment to be disbanded in the Indian Army's 1933 reductions. Two forces drove the disbandment. The first was financial: the global economic crisis of the early 1930s forced the Indian Army to cut costs, and the pioneer regiments were a target. The second was political: the Afghan government, which by the late 1920s had begun systematically enlisting Hazaras into its own army, formally requested that Britain stop recruiting Afghan nationals. The request was, on its face, a matter of national sovereignty. Its effect was to remove the institutional protection that military service had provided to Quetta's Hazara community for nearly thirty years.

In 1918, in recognition of the difficulty of recruiting Hazaras from Hazarajat - the Afghan government was now claiming those men for its own forces - the British had briefly enlisted approximately one hundred Balti men as temporary replacements. Almost all were demobilized after the armistice without having deployed. The episode is a small indicator of how the recruitment pipeline was already under strain by the end of the war.

When the regiment was disbanded in 1933, the men who had served in it returned to civilian life in Quetta. No Hazara-specific land grants or veteran provisions are documented in the historical record. The community shifted toward civil service, trade, and commerce. The institutional anchor was gone.

The Triple Erasure

Why does this history not exist in general awareness? The answer involves at least three distinct layers of forgetting, each one compounding the others.

The first layer is the broader erasure of South Asian service in WWI. Approximately 1.3 to 1.5 million South Asian soldiers and laborers served in the First World War. Nearly 70,000 died. They represented roughly one-sixth of all soldiers who served the British Empire. Despite this, they have been almost entirely absent from mainstream WWI commemoration in Britain and Europe - absent from the centenary exhibitions, from political speeches, from the commemorative architecture of national memory. The reason is structural. After Indian independence in 1947, these men became, in a sense, India's problem. Britain moved on from empire; the South Asian dead were left behind on the other side of the partition.

India and Pakistan, meanwhile, built national memories centered on the independence struggle. Soldiers who had served the Crown were awkward figures in those narratives - they had not fought for independence. They had fought for the colonial power from which independence was eventually won. On both sides of the new border, these men faded.

The second layer is specific to Hazaras. The Hazara Pioneers were recruited from a refugee community with no nation-state to hold their memory. Afghanistan had no interest in commemorating men who had served a foreign colonial army - especially not during a period when the Afghan state was actively hostile to Hazaras. Hazarajat's own communities had, in many cases, no knowledge of what their kinsmen were doing in Quetta. The community that had the most direct connection to the regiment - the Quetta Hazaras - spent the decades after 1933 fighting for economic survival and then, from the 1980s onward, enduring escalating sectarian violence. Military history was not a priority for a community under existential pressure.

The third layer is structural and administrative. The Hazara Pioneers were recruited almost entirely from Afghan nationals - men who were not British Indian subjects in the way that soldiers from Bengal, Punjab, or Madras were. They existed in a legal grey zone. The martial race classification that organized much of British thinking about Indian military recruitment did not formally apply to them in the same way. When the Afghan government requested in the late 1920s and early 1930s that Britain stop recruiting Afghan subjects, this recognition of Hazaras as Afghan nationals was a double-edged acknowledgment: it contributed to the regiment's disbandment, and it meant neither country took ownership of the veterans' memory. They were too Afghan for British India's commemorative structures. They were too compromised - having served a colonial power - for Afghanistan's.

Pioneer regiments as a category also attracted less attention from military historians than cavalry or combat infantry. Building roads through Mesopotamia did not generate the same commemorative literature as the charges at Gallipoli or the breaking of the Hindenburg Line. The regiment's work was essential. It was also quiet, methodical, and, by the standards of military narrative, unspectacular.

The result of these three layers stacking on top of each other is close to complete erasure. The Hazara Pioneers are not in the general histories. They are not in the community's oral tradition. They exist primarily in the archives - in the National Archives at Kew, in the British Library, in the IWM database, in the CWGC casualty registers - waiting for someone to look.

The Legacy Figure

The most historically significant person to emerge from the Hazara Pioneers lineage did not serve in WWI. Muhammad Musa Khan was born in Quetta in 1908, to a Hazara family. He enlisted in the British Indian Army as a private in 1926, joining the 4th Hazara Pioneers. He was selected for the first intake of the Indian Military Academy at Dehra Dun in October 1932 - a class that also included a young officer named Sam Manekshaw, who would later become Field Marshal and Chief of Army Staff of the Indian Army. Musa was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in February 1935.

After partition in 1947, he joined the Pakistani Army. He served in North Africa and Burma in the Second World War. He eventually became the 4th Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistan Army, serving from 1958 to 1966 - the most senior military position in a country of millions. He later served as Governor of West Pakistan and Governor of Balochistan.

Muhammad Musa Khan's career is not a WWI story. But it is a story about what the Hazara Pioneers produced: men who went from refugee families in Quetta to the highest positions in the armies of newly independent nations. The regiment was the institutional ladder. It no longer exists. Most people, including most Hazaras, do not know it ever did.

Recovering the Record

The primary source material for this history exists and is accessible. The war diary at the National Archives (WO 95/5222/8) has not, to the knowledge of this publication, been systematically read and published. The Bunbury monograph at the British Library - a 25-page history of the regiment from 1904 to 1933 - is rare but physically accessible. The India Office Records at the British Library hold administrative records from the regiment's entire service history. The IWM database holds 485 individual records for men who served.

A full recovery of this history would require primary archival research - a week or two at Kew and the British Library, patience with handwritten war diaries, and the kind of sustained attention that small units rarely attract from professional historians. The CWGC records for the sixty known dead should be systematically compiled, so that every name is known and documented. The 485 IWM database entries should be analyzed, not merely counted.

This article is a beginning. It establishes that the 106th Hazara Pioneers existed, that they served in France, Persia, and Mesopotamia, that sixty of their soldiers died and are commemorated in memorials across four countries, and that their erasure from collective memory was not accidental - it was the product of overlapping political, structural, and administrative forces that no single person chose and no single person could have reversed.

For Hazaras who want to understand the full scope of their community's history, this chapter is not a digression. It sits at the center of what the community was and what was done to it. The men who joined the 106th were, in many cases, the children of people who had been driven from their homeland by one of the most violent episodes in the people's history. They enlisted in a foreign army because it was the most viable option available to them. They served in some of the worst conditions of one of the most destructive wars in human history. They built roads and railways that still exist. They were decorated for gallantry. They came home. And then, for ninety years, no one wrote it down.

The record is there. It is waiting.

Primary Databases