Al-Jaf tribe:
It is the largest Kurdish tribe in the Middle East, with a population of up to 4 million people
They live in the border areas between Iran and Iraq, they speak the Sorani Kurdish dialect, and they ruled the Emirate of Ardalan until the sixties of the nineteenth century. The tribe was established in the year 1114 by the Kurdish king Zahir Beg al-Jaf, and their ancestral home was the castle of Sherwana. The Ottoman state granted them the name Pasha, which is a noble title in the eighteenth century. The English traveler Claudius James Rigg described the Al-Jaf clan, as he saw them in Sulaymaniyah in 1820 AD, as follows: (The al-Jaf clans headed by Kaykhusro Bey live in the high mountains, and the men of this clan are handsome and brave, but even in the eyes of the Kurds they consider themselves to be one of the most wild and savage clans. When its feudal leader, the Pasha of Sulaymaniyah, invites him to the field of battle, the clan can easily recruit four thousand riflemen - infantry - and they are considered among the finest warriors in the #Kurdish# army).
As for the origin of the name Al-Jaf, the interpretations and explanations are very different about it. One opinion says that the name is taken from the name of Jafer (Jafar), who may have been one of the ancient ancestors of Al-Jaff, given that the #Kurds# used to call Jaffer by ((Jaffa)). As for the well-known poet, satisfied, he saw that Al-Jaf are among the remnants of the Al-Jah Fayi cavalry, who were the elite chosen from the vanguards of the army of Shah Sultan Hussein Al-Safavi (1694-1722). While other researchers believe that the word Al-Jaf is derived from the name of the Kurdish tribe, Jawan, which migrated groups, including the Damavand Mountains, north of Tehran, towards the western regions of Iran, and imposed its name on the place to which it came (Javan Road), meaning the Jawanin River. This area (present-day Guanro) is the original home of the Al-Jaf tribe.
And the famous historian Mustafa Jawad mentions in his book (Jawan, the forgotten Kurdish clan) that the Jawan clan was one of the largest Kurdish clans, and groups of them migrated from western Iran towards the central regions of Iraq in the middle of the fourth century AH, so they played an important role there, then they descended at the end of the century Fifth Hijri towards the south, so they contributed with the Arab tribe of Bani Asad in building the city of Hilla, and they also established the Emirate of Al-Jawani in the region, and the graves of some of their princes are still visible in the city of Hilla to this day (such as Waram Al-Jawani). As for how the name Jawan changed to dry, it is said that the word Jawan was pronounced according to the prevailing Kurmanji dialect with (Javan) because the letter and is pronounced in this dialect with a V, then it shortened over time to dry.[1] [2]