The bulk of Karīm Khan’s manpower was recruited from among the Iranian pastoral nomads (Lor, Lak, and Kurd) of the Zagros foothills and Hamadān plains of his home range—the largely Shiʿite Baḵtīārī, Faylī Lor, Zand, Zangana, Vand, and Kalhor tribes. These were supplemented by tofanġčī and ǰazāyeṛčī units recruited, as ever, from the peasantry of the western and central provinces, but also from the Gulf littoral (Daštestān) around Būšehr; these the wakīl appreciated and, at least during his crucial campaigns of 1166/1753, treated so preferentially as to antagonize his tribal cavalry (Nāmī, Gītīgošā, p. 35; Perry, op. cit., p. 51). From the 1760s his army was augmented by qezelbāš Turkmen (Afšārs of Urmia, Qajars of Astarābād), Turkicized Kurds of Azerbaijan (Donbalī, Šaqāqī), Arabs from the Daštestān, and Iranians from Lār and Kermān—though on an occasional rather than a regular basis. These were predominantly Shiʿites. The vestigial field artillery (Amīr Khan Tūpčī-bāšī, Nāder Shah’s artillery commander on the western front, had taken his guns to Mašhad in 1162/1749; Maṛʿašī, Maǰmaʿ al-tawārīḵ, pp. 88-89) consisted chiefly of 700 zanbūraks under a Georgian officer (Perry, op. cit., p. 87).
Having gained power through diplomacy as much as by force of arms, Karīm Khan did not use his army to coerce refractory subjects or extort supplies and revenue to anything like the degree Nāder Shah had done. His standing army of Fārs during the period 1765-75 may be broken down approximately as follows (Table 9, see Fasāʾī, I, p. 219; Partow Bayżāʾī, “Tārīḵ,” 58-59; Perry, op. cit., pp. 279-80):
These numbers represent paper totals from the ledger of the laškarnevīs—perhaps about 1187/1774, during mobilization for the siege of Baṣra—and must be reduced by at least half to give a realistic assessment of available fighting forces. For example, in 1765 Niebuhr was told confidentially by a Georgian officer that the force being led by Amīr Gūna Khan against rebels at Bandar Rīg, theoretically comprising 4,000 cavalry and 6,000 infantry, in reality counted no more than 1,100 and 500 respectively fit for service (Reisebeschreibungen II, pp. 102-03). Estimates reaching Russian officials at Rašt in the late 1760s put the Shiraz garrison at no more than 4,000, backed by a few tribal and peasant levies (Arunova and Ashrafyan, “Novye materialy,” p. 111 n. 8).
The élite corps of the wakīl’s guard, the 1,400 ḡolāms (slaves), comprised 1,200 Lors armed with flintlock muskets (hence ḡelmān-e čaḵmāqī; most other musketeers still carried antiquated matchlocks) plus 200 Kurds, Georgians, and others. This body was probably a vestige of the Safavid qūllar (slaves), mounted musketeers numbering ideally 12,000 in Shah ʿAbbās’ time and originally recruited—like the Ottoman janissaries—from Christian populations of the south Caucasus (Lockhart, “The Persian Army,” p. 93). The ʿerāqī units are likewise probably a relic of the 12,000-strong Safavid tofanġčī corps. Officers numbered 6,000 in all: Their nomenclature in essence continues the Turco-Mongol decimal terminology as inherited from the qezelbāš tribes, but with the numerical component in some cases realized in Persian, thus mīn-bāšī (commander of 1,000) and yūz-bāšī (of 100), but pānṣad-bāšī (of 500) and panǰāh-bāšī (of 50) (Niebuhr, op. cit., p. 103).
). And. I don't think the Timurs were from that time.