Alikozai

The Alikozai are one of the four clans of the Zirak branch of the Durrani, with the Popalzai, Barakzai and Achakzai. Elphinstone, who collected his information in 1808 and 1809, lists them second among the Zirak clans and notes that the old division into Zirak and Panjpai still marked descent, with Zirak reckoned the more honourable. Encyclopaedia Iranica gives the same four Zirak clans and places them mainly around Kandahar.

The Khulasat al-Ansab, the late eighteenth-century genealogy quoted by Dorn, makes Alekko a son of Firak son of Abdal, with Popal and Barek as his brothers. Bellew gives the principal sections of the clan in 1891 as Kaso, Sarkani and Ziyura.^1,5,6,2

Elphinstone put the Alikozai at only ten thousand families and wrote that in country and habits they resembled the Alizai, from whom the Helmand separated them. Bellew, seventy-five years later, counted about fifteen thousand families, mostly farmers, holding Jaldak, the Arghandab and Panjwai to the east, north and west of Kandahar city. He also records Alikozai settlements in Khakrez, in the hills north of Maiwand and in Zamindawar on the west bank of the Helmand, and scattered families as far west as Herat.

The two accounts differ on Zamindawar. Elphinstone treats it as Alizai country and places the Alikozai on the other side of the river; Bellew finds Alikozai living there by the 1880s.^3,2

Bellew records that the mother of Ahmad Shah, founder of the Durrani kingdom in 1747, was an Alikozai. Under his grandson Shah Zaman the clan's chiefs were drawn into the court struggles at Kandahar. In about 1799 Muhammad Azim Khan, head of the Alikozai, joined Sarafraz Khan Barakzai and four other lords in a plot to kill the vizier Wafadar Khan, depose Shah Zaman and enthrone his brother Shuja. The plot was betrayed, and the conspirators were beheaded the next morning. Hukumat Khan Alikozai was put to death soon afterwards.

In 1800 Abdullah Khan Alikozai, governor of Kashmir, came to court and was seized and tortured. His brother Saidal Khan, then at Kandahar, took the whole clan over to Shah Zaman's rival Mahmud. Elphinstone counts this among the acts that cost Shah Zaman his throne later that year.^2,4,7

Bellew names one Alikozai of the Kaso section as the best known of the clan in his own century: Yar Muhammad, the wazir of Herat. Bellew gives no dates for him.²