The Siege of Malakand was the 26 July – 2 August 1897 siege of the British garrison in the Malakand region of modern day Pakistan's North West Frontier Province. The British faced a force of Pashtun tribesmen whose tribal lands had been dissected by the Durand Line, the 1,519 mile (2,445 km) border between Afghanistan and Pakistan drawn up at the end of the Anglo-Afghan wars to help hold the Russian Empire's spread of influence towards British India. The unrest caused by this division of the Pashtun lands led to the rise of Saidullah, a Pashtun Fakir who led an army of at least 10,000 against the British garrison in Malakand. Although the British forces were divided amongst a number of poorly defended positions, the small garrison at the camp of Malakand South and the small fort at Chakdara were both able to hold out for six days against the much larger Pashtun army. The siege was lifted when a relief column dispatched from British positions to the south was sent to assist General William Hope Meiklejohn, commander of the British forces at Malakand South. Accompanying this relief force was second lieutenant Winston S. Churchill, who later published his account as The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War.
Read the rest of this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Malakand
_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:
1553: Condemned as a heretic, Michael Servetus was burned at the stake outside Geneva. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Servetus)
1904: The New York City Subway, one of the most extensive public transportation systems in the world, opened with its first segment running between New York City Hall and Harlem. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway)
1958: General Ayub Khan deposed Iskander Mirza in a bloodless coup d'état to become the second President of Pakistan, less than three weeks after Mirza had appointed him the enforcer of martial law. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayub_Khan)
1961: NASA launched the first Saturn I rocket, the United States' first dedicated spacecraft designed specifically to launch loads into Earth orbit. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_I)
1971: The Democratic Republic of the Congo was renamed Zaire after a Portuguese mispronunciation of the Kikongo word nzere or nzadi, which translates to "the river that swallows all rivers." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaire)
_____________________ Wiktionary's Word of the day:
delude: To deceive someone into believing something which is false. (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/delude)
_____________________ Wikiquote of the day:
Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. -- Theodore Roosevelt (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Theodore_Roosevelt)
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