In 1874 they made a raid southward and commenced harassing the frontier towns, actually laying siege to Mandali, an important border town. Beaten off by troops and other tribes, they retired, and a number conducted a successful raid as far north as the Christian villages around Bayazid, returning, so report says, laden with spoil, and unassailed, though their chief weapon was but the lance. Five years later they fell upon Sulaimania, and the town was only saved from wholesale looting by the arrival of a battalion of soldiers. Shortly after this exploit, the Turks having by treachery trapped some of the petty chiefs, a section was deported to the district of Tripoli, in Africa, whence they returned. Six months are said to have elapsed on the journey, and it is still the boast of the Hamavands that they looted Arab and Turk alike upon their return journey. Later again they encroached upon the territory of the great Jaf tribe, and were warned off by the Pasha of these powerful Kurds, under pain of incurring blood-feud. About 1900, or earlier, incited by the shaikhs of Sulaimania and Qaradagh, they fell upon a large caravan of Persian pilgrims near Kirkuk, destroying two hundred of these unfortunates. Up to this time Sulaimania, Rawanduz, and Keui Sanjaq had enjoyed considerable revenues from the pilgrims who passed from Persia, _via_ Sauj Bulaq, to Bagdad, but after this the traffic ceased, and the shaikhs have lost for their neighbourhood a source of considerable wealth in satisfying the fanatical impulse to slay Shi’a Musulmans. In 1908 the Hamavands crowned a campaign of two years’ indiscriminate looting by announcing themselves in rebellion, and between the autumn of that year and summer of 1909 made good their assertion by stripping the Governor of Sulaimania, stopping all traffic, ending with the feat of attacking a “tabur” of Turkish soldiers, killing twelve (including a colonel and other officers), wounding forty or fifty and depriving them of all their possessions, including Mauser rifles, several loads of ammunition, clothing, daggers, uniforms and animals, leaving the miserable survivors thirty-six miles to tramp into Sulaimania. During this period they threatened the town several times, and always kept bands moving round about, so that corpses had to be taken out under a strong guard for burial, and often only with Hamavand permission.