Headquarters Miranshah · Tochi River · nine tehsils · 693,332 people in 2023 · former agency, now a KP district
North Waziristan is the Tochi valley and the high ground around it, against the Afghan line, west of Bannu. Miranshah (Miran Shah) is the headquarters. Mir Ali is the larger inhabited belt on the same river. Razmak sits high. Datta Khel opens toward the west. Ghulam Khan is a border name. For a century this land was an agency, not a district. In 2018 the 25th Amendment put it inside Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The mountains did not become a settled city because the law changed.
Utmanzai Wazirs hold much of the high ground. Dawars hold much of the Tochi plain around Mir Ali — Hassu Khel, Haider Khel, Musa Khel, Idoak, Khaddi and the other named villages on that belt. Pashto is the language of the 2023 tables (Mir Ali tehsil prints 229,242 Pashto speakers out of 229,647 people). A student page that treats this district as empty “tribal space” has already failed. People farm, keep shops, send children to school when the road is open, and remember years when the road was not.
This note is longer than the other district pages on purpose. The census is not the whole file. After 2001 this agency became one of the places the rest of Pakistan associated with armed groups, army operations, and a million people sleeping in Bannu and beyond. Those facts belong on an atlas page. Methods of violence do not. Named campaigns, public casualty claims, camp registration numbers, and the return process do.
PBS 2023: 693,332 people, 99,595 households, area 4,707 km². Literacy 32.82 percent — 46.94 percent for men, 18.03 percent for women. Under-tens about 254,000 (37 percent of the surveyed population). Sex ratio about 105 men per 100 women. The compiled urban row for Miranshah town itself is tiny — a few thousand in the municipal-style lists — because most life is village and tehsil, not a city corporation.
Read that 693,000 against 2017’s 540,546 and 1998’s 361,246. Growth on paper includes return after displacement as well as births. It is not a quiet village curve like Haripur’s.
Mir Ali — 605 km², 229,647 people, literacy about 38.3 percent. Largest count. Tochi plain. Dawar villages named above. A 110-bed THQ-style hospital was publicly inaugurated here during the return years.
Miran Shah — 402 km², 123,317 people, literacy about 36.5 percent. Headquarters, fort, offices, the name on every national bulletin.
Datta Khel — 1,807 km², 92,196 people, literacy about 30.6 percent. Largest land, thin settlement. Western tehsil. Still appears in later security notices.
Spinwam — 548 km², 54,209 people, literacy about 23.5 percent.
Dossali — 250 km², 50,524 people, literacy about 33 percent.
Razmak — 191 km², 49,367 people, literacy about 26.6 percent. High station. Cadet College Razmak is the boarding-school name Pakistan already knows.
Shewa — 393 km², 44,126 people, literacy about 38.4 percent.
Ghulam Khan — 191 km², 31,015 people, literacy about 8.4 percent — the lowest printed tehsil row in this district. Border tehsil.
Gharyum — 320 km², 18,931 people, literacy about 17.7 percent. Smallest count.
Those nine rows are why a page that only says “Miranshah” is incomplete. Two tehsils hold half the people. Two others print literacy under 18 percent.
The British made North Waziristan an agency in the 1890s. Political agents, militias and allowances were the old kit. Mirzali Khan — the Faqir of Ipi — used the Ipi side of Mir Ali in the 1930s before moving deeper into Waziristan. That is anti-colonial history on the local tongue, not a template for later groups.
Pakistan kept the agency system. FATA had a different criminal law, a different representation, and a thinner school-and-hospital map than settled districts. Young men went to the Gulf, to Karachi, to the army, and later into the wars next door. After 1979 the Afghan war sent guns, money and guests through this belt. After 2001 the same geography sat next to a new Afghan war. Armed organisations that the Pakistani state later listed as terrorist groups used parts of the agency as shelter. That sentence is public record. This page will not map hideouts or teach anyone how a group worked.
Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and allied factions are the names that appear in official statements about attacks on security posts, markets and schools across KP and the old FATA. North Waziristan was repeatedly described, in ISPR and interior-ministry language, as a place from which those groups planned and hid. Foreign organisations also used the agency in those years. Pakistani civilians in Bannu, Peshawar and Karachi paid for that geography in funerals. People inside the agency paid in curfews, raids, and years away from home.
The state answer was a sequence of military operations. South Waziristan had already seen Rah-e-Nijat in 2009. North Waziristan was the operation the country waited on. On 15 June 2014 the army announced Operation Zarb-e-Azb in North Waziristan, days after the attack on Karachi’s Jinnah International Airport. Official language said the campaign was against all listed groups in the agency, without picking favourites. ISPR later said the main kinetic phase covered thousands of square kilometres, that hundreds of soldiers were killed, and that thousands of militants were claimed killed. Those are official claims. Independent reporters and later violence both say the story did not end in 2016, when the operation was described as concluded.
Later years brought further named actions under the wider “Radd-ul-Fasaad” and follow-on clearances. Datta Khel and other tehsils still appear in 2020s security briefs. A student should hold two true things at once: large operations changed the map of who could sit in Miranshah in 2014–16, and armed attacks did not vanish from the district or from KP after the victory statements.
Drone strikes by the United States, including a 2012 strike in the Mir Ali belt that killed a senior al-Qaeda figure, are also part of the public file. They are not a Pakistani army chapter. They are part of why families in this valley talk about the sky as well as the road.
When Zarb-e-Azb began, civilians were told to leave. They went east — first to Bannu, then onward to DI Khan, Tank, Lakki, Peshawar and Karachi if they had a cousin. UN and IDMC write-ups put the displacement above one million people at the peak, on the order of 90,000-plus families. Pakistani registration points (Saidgai is the name that appears in 2014 briefs) counted hundreds of thousands within weeks. Early ISPR notes spoke of more than 450,000 registered by late June 2014; later army briefings used family counts near 290,000 families displaced over the campaign. Different agencies counted heads and households on different days. The human fact is the same: this was one of the largest sudden displacements in Pakistan in that decade.
Camps and host neighbourhoods in Bannu were hot, crowded and short of latrines. Children missed years of school. Polio drops were given at registration points because teams could not walk the agency. Women delivered babies in school buildings. Men who had been shopkeepers in Mir Ali became ration-card numbers. Some families split — one brother stayed with livestock if he could, another took the children to Bannu. Compensation for destroyed houses was announced in schemes and then argued over, house by house, for years.
Return was staged. By December 2015 the then army chief was briefed that about 40 percent of displaced families had gone back (a briefing figure of roughly 108,000 families returned of about 292,000). Mid-2016 official talk put return above 60 percent, with a target to finish the same year. Many did go back. Many found walls down, shops empty, and a checkpoint where a street had been. “Return” on a dashboard is not the same as a rebuilt bazaar. Some families went back and left again when firing started. Some never rebuilt in Datta Khel or Gharyum and stayed in Bannu as a second hometown.
FDMA, PDMA and army engineering units ran roads, schools and THQ buildings as part of the public rehabilitation story. A hospital opening in Mir Ali was used as a symbol in 2015. Symbols do not feed a widow through the first winter. The honest atlas line is that reconstruction was real and uneven, and that people from this district still carry Bannu phone numbers.
2018 made a deputy commissioner and a police line where a political agent had sat. Courts, local government and KP school budgets are supposed to follow. In practice the security map still decides whether a girls’ school in Spinwam has a teacher on Tuesday. Female literacy at 18 percent overall, and 8 percent in Ghulam Khan tehsil, is the education paragraph. Cadet College Razmak is an exception, not the district average.
Miranshah and Mir Ali need a working DHQ, not only a checkpoint. Bannu remains the specialist-hospital town. Agriculture on the Tochi, livestock, small shops and remittances pay households when the road to Bannu is open. When it is closed, prices jump the same week.
Violence after 2021 — TTP and other groups named in official statements — brought new funerals to KP and new operations to this district. Write that as a continuing public fact. Do not write a scoreboard.
It will not list how an attack is built. It will not praise a militant organisation or treat the army campaign as a video game. It will not pretend every Wazir or Dawar family chose a side. Most people in the 2023 census were children or farmers. They are the majority this atlas is for.
If you live in Haider Khel or Spinwam and want your village named on a later edit, send it. That is how this site is supposed to grow — with living names, not with rumours.
Sources: PBS 2023 district and tehsil tables; ISPR public briefings on Zarb-e-Azb and IDP return (2014–16); UN / IDMC displacement write-ups; KP tehsil literacy rows; 25th Amendment merger record. Last checked September 2026.