It was most common for the Ottomans to use the Turkoman people to control the population, but they also used Kurds. Ali Janbulad was a Kurdish warlord from Kilis. He fought in the Ottoman armies, and controlled the Ottoman army in Palestine. The Ottomans tried to settle the nomadic people and tried to make them become farmers. The Kurds, however, started to have firearms in the 1580s and 1590s. Kurdish lords became more powerful and started to control the trade routes between Mosul, Baghdad, Aleppo, and Adana. Kurdish lords controlled the mountain lands between the inland cities of Syria (Aleppo, Damascus, Hama and Homs) and the ports of the Mediterranean Sea (Payas, Iskenderun, Antioch, Latakia, Tripoli). Kurdish traders carried the imports and exports, and Kurdish tribes sometimes attacked the trade routes. Kurdish soldiers attacked the river trade route of the Tigris, and the Yazidis on the way between Mosul and Aleppo always gave resistance to the Ottoman government. The mountain roads were sometimes impossible to pass through for months or years because of the Kurdish lords. Travellers would bribe the Kurds, and take hostages. The Ottoman government did not have success in trying to control the roads with the army and with fortifications. The Ottoman government sometimes gave Kurdish warlords government authority, so that they might do as the government wanted. After 1600, the power of the Ottoman governors in Aleppo and Mosul was weak, so each governor had an army. The cavalry in these armies were mostly Kurds from the area of Kilis. However, when governors went away after their term of office, their armies' veterans became unemployed and many became bandits in rural areas. Banditry from Kurds and Bedouins was so common in the early 18th century that the population of farmers around Homs and Hama became smaller and there was not enough food in Damascus as a result.