Dera Ismail Khan District

Dera Ismail Khan () is one of the 24 district in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. The capital of the district is the town of Dera Ismail Khan. The district has an area of 7,326 km² and a population of 852,995 as of the 1998 Census.

Location

The district of Dera Ismail Khan is bounded on the east by the Mianwali and Bhakkar districts of Punjab, to the southwest by South Waziristan district, and to the northwest by Tank and Lakki Marwat districts.

History

Dera Ismail Khan was created as an administrative unit of British India, part of the Derajat Division of the North-West Frontier Province, though this was not accepted by the local rulers. It was formerly divided into two almost equal portions by the Indus River, which intersected it from north to south. To the west of the Indus the characteristics of the country resembled those of Dera Ghazi Khan. This region included Mithapur, home of the Shahs of Mithapur. To the east of the present bed of the river there is a wide tract known as the Kachi, exposed to river action. Beyond this, the country rises abruptly, and a barren, almost desert plain stretches eastwards, sparsely cultivated, and inhabited by nomadic tribes of herdsmen. In 1901 the trans-Indus tract was allotted to the newly formed North-West Frontier Province, the cis-Indus tract remaining in the Punjab jurisdiction. The cis-Indus portions of the Dera Ismail Khan and Bannu districts now comprise the new Punjab district of Mianwali....
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