DARRA ADAM KHEL

I am sure not many people have heard of this strange name. The township of Darra Adam Khel sits along Peshawar-Kohat Road in Pakistan, about 40 km South of Peshawar. It has poorly built double storey houses in the sand hills of Kohat Frontier region in Orakzai Agency. The name literally means Valley of Adam Khel and Adam Khel is a clan of Afridi Tribe. It is a state within a state; it is part of Pakistan but Pakistani Law does not apply here. The sole business of inhabitants of this place is manufacturing and selling guns! The town has only one street, lined on either side with shops and each one of these shops is a workshop cum showroom for guns of various descriptions, barring a handful of tea and meat shops interspersed.

On and off the main street there are hundreds of small workshops where men and children make working and amazingly original looking copies of almost all guns in the world. In the name of machines they have nothing more than a small drill press and a few hand tools. The tools are astonishingly primitive, yet the forges turn out accurate reproduction of every conceivable sort of weapon, from pen pistols and hand grenades to automatic rifles and anti aircraft guns. The copies are so painstakingly reproduced that even the serial No. of the original is carried over. A Darra gunsmith, given a rifle he hasn't seen before, can duplicate it in around 10 days. Once the first copy is made, each additional copy takes two or three days due to the templates created. Handguns, due to being more complex take a little longer.

In Darra, over 75% of the inhabitants are involved in the gun business and up to 800 pieces of armament are produced every day. And the No. is only increasing. The testing ranges are readiy at hand; a dealer has to simply step out in the open to fire 20-30 rounds in the air from the freshly made weapon and the gun is tested. Work pattern is fairly simple over here! Pak government does not permit foreigners into DAK for 'security reasons' and venturing into the area without permit is fraught with dangers. A weapon is considered an ornament for a Pashtun and the two cannot simply be separated. There are still many places on earth where we cannot tread without endangering our lives and DAK is perhaps on the top of that list.