Jezail

The heavy weight of the jezail allowed the rifle itself to absorb more energy from the round, imparting less recoil to the weapon's user.

The function of this curve is debated; it may be purely decorative, or it may have allowed the jezail to be tucked under the arm and cradled tightly against the body, as opposed to being held to the shoulder like a typical musket or rifle.

The argument against this method of firing is that the flash pan would be dangerously close to the face and the weapon would be harder to aim.

Because of their advantage in range, Pashtun marksmen typically used the jezail from the tops of cliffs along valleys and defiles during ambushes.

In the First Anglo-Afghan War the British established a cantonment outside of Kabul with dirt walls approximately waist high.

[citation needed] A description from the British Library dating to the First Anglo-Afghan War: Afghan snipers were expert marksmen and their juzzails fired roughened bullets, long iron nails or even pebbles over a range of some 250 metres.

It was also mentioned in the George MacDonald Fraser adventure Flashman, whose protagonist describes the awful slaughter of British troops retreating from Kabul to Jalalabad by Pashtun jezailchis.

[6] The weapon appears in Rudyard Kipling's 1886 poem Arithmetic on the Frontier, where the low cost of the weapon is contrasted with the relatively expensive training and education of British officers: Another reference to the jezail occurs in Kipling's novel The Man Who Would Be King, where the Kohat Jezail is mentioned along with the more advanced Snider and Martini rifles of the British.

[7] P. G. Wodehouse in Jill the Reckless (1920) describes how the character Uncle Chris, in India during his first hill-campaign, would "walk up and down in front of his men under a desultory shower of jezail-bullets".