British occupy Khash

The British chronology of the war records under 11 May 1916: “Kwash (East Persia) occupied by British forces”. This refers to Khash, written in period sources as Khwash, Vasht or Washt, today a town in the Iranian province of Sistan and Baluchestan. In 1916 it was a settlement with a mud fort on an upland on the southern slopes of the Taftan volcano, the capital of the Sarhad, a mountainous and desert region on the border between Persia and British Baluchistan. It was taken by Brigadier Reginald Dyer, commander of the troops of the East Persia Cordon, later known for the Amritsar massacre of 1919. Dyer described this campaign in his memoir The Raiders of the Sarhad (1921), which gives no exact dates. From his account it follows that he finally occupied Khash about a week after 4 May, which agrees with the chronology’s date. The report of the Commander-in-Chief in India, General Charles Monro, says in general terms that Dyer moved part of his forces to Khash in May 1916.

The Sarhad was inhabited by nomadic Baluch tribes, living largely by plunder. The strongest of them, the Yarmuhammadzai of the old chief Jiand Khan, the Gamshadzai of Khalil Khan and the Ismailzai of Juma Khan, were raiding more and more often the camel caravans that brought supplies from the railhead at Nushki to the cordon’s base at Robat. According to Monro’s report they were being stirred up by the German agent Erich Zugmayer. Without these caravans the troops guarding the border with Afghanistan could not hold out, so at the beginning of March 1916 Dyer was sent from India to put an end to the raids. He had very few men, so he relied on bluff. His spies spread the word that a great British general was approaching with five thousand soldiers, although in reality Dyer had two mountain guns, two machine guns, seventeen troopers of the 28th Light Cavalry, nine trained infantrymen, a few dozen recruits and a handful of local levies. In April, after a brief skirmish at the foot of the Taftan in which, according to Dyer, seven Baluch were killed, Jiand’s force scattered and the chief himself soon surrendered. The commander of the fort at Khash, frightened by the threat that the British would “blow it up”, handed it over without a fight.

Dyer, however, could not leave a real garrison in the captured fort. Only the chief of the pro-British Reki tribe with a few men and five infantrymen remained there. The main force set out against the Ismailzai, and the chiefs of the Sarhad, treated leniently by Dyer, swore on the Koran to be loyal to the British. On 3 May they were allowed to go home from Kacha. That very same day Idu, the commander of the local levies from Chagai, reported to Dyer that Jiand, as soon as he had left, had called on the other chiefs to break their oath, retake Khash and destroy the weak British force. Only Juma Khan did not join the plot. Dyer judged that the loss of the fort would undo the whole effect of the bluff, and the next day the race began. Major Landon led a column by the shortest route, reckoning on seven days’ march, while Dyer himself set off across country by car, the first ever seen in those parts, with his driver Allen and Idu. After a night drive across rocky hills, on bare rims, the car got stuck at dawn a few kilometres short of the fort. Dyer reached Khash by camel and found his men still in it, although Shah Sawar, a kinsman of Jiand, was already camped nearby with his band, and in the evening Jiand himself arrived.

The night in the fort with a handful of defenders was, as Dyer wrote, the most anxious of the whole campaign. Idu, on Dyer’s behalf, tried to convince Jiand that a whole army that had come by motor car was stationed at Khash. In the morning Landon’s cavalry arrived, followed soon by the rest of the column with the guns. Jiand then appeared at the fort on a “courtesy visit”, assuring the general that he had come only to pay his respects. Dyer accepted these assurances without letting on how close he had come to disaster. From then on Khash was a permanent post of the cordon. As General William Dickson, inspector of communications of the troops in eastern Persia, later wrote, the fort kept the tribes in check and at the same time made it possible to collect food in one of the few fertile corners of the Sarhad.

The peace did not last long. In July the tribes took up arms again, and Dyer set out from Khash for Gusht. According to Monro’s report, the fighting from 12 to 29 July, including the engagement at Kalag on 21 July, enabled the British to capture most of the Yarmuhammadzai herds. Khalil Khan was killed, and the chiefs of the Sarhad finally submitted, and some of their men were enlisted into British service as levies. On 5 October 1916 Dyer, now ill, returned to India. His memoirs, written with a good deal of self-praise, remain the main source on this campaign.