British occupy Mashhad

The British chronology of the war records under 3 March 1918 that Mashhad, the chief city of the Persian province of Khorasan, was occupied by troops of the British East Persia Cordon. In its index, however, the chronology marks this date as approximate. The British researcher Michael Sargent, who described the affair on the basis of India Office records, writes only that the reinforced cordon had reached Mashhad “by 14 March”. The Commander-in-Chief in India, General Charles Monro, stated in general terms in his report of 1919 that the departure of the Russians had made it necessary “early in the year” to extend the cordon northwards as far as Mashhad. It was not, in any case, a capture of the city in the usual sense. Persia remained a neutral state, nobody fought for Mashhad, and the soldiers from India were taking the place of the Russians, who had guarded the northern part of the cordon since 1915.

Mashhad was one of the most important cities of Persia. It is home to the shrine of Imam Reza, the eighth imam of the Shia, a place of pilgrimage for the whole Shia world. The city lay close to the border with Russian Turkestan and with Afghanistan, on the roads to Herat and to Russian Central Asia. Under the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 northern Khorasan belonged to the Russian sphere of influence. The Russians kept a consulate general with a Cossack escort in Mashhad, and in the spring of 1912 their artillery shelled the imam’s shrine, where rebels had taken refuge. The British had their own consulate general here, their most important observation post for Khorasan, eastern Afghanistan and Russian Central Asia.

After the Bolshevik revolution the Russian units in Khorasan fell apart just like the army as a whole. The new authorities in Petrograd, in their appeal to the Muslims of Russia and the East of 3 December 1917 (20 November O.S.), announced that the agreement on the partition of Persia was void and promised to withdraw their troops from it. According to the memoirs of the British officer Charles Ellis, who served in Mashhad in the summer of 1918, Cossacks had until recently been stationed at Birjand, Torbat-e Heydarieh and Mashhad itself. At the beginning of January London agreed that India should take over the whole cordon. F. J. Moberly’s British official history of the Mesopotamian campaign explains that it was still to cut Afghanistan off from German and Turkish agents. North from Birjand ran a road built by the Russians to Mashhad and on to the border at Bajgiran. Supplies came from Quetta by a railway which, according to Percy Sykes, reached the Persian border in the spring of 1918, and then by lorry, over more than 400 miles, that is about 650 kilometres.

The sources do not say exactly how many soldiers entered Mashhad, or when. In April 1918, according to British reports, the cordon’s troops stretched from Saindak on the Baluchistan border all the way to Mashhad. In the city were the consul general, Lieutenant-Colonel Grey, and the British military attaché, Colonel Redl. In April the Government of India sent four intelligence officers to assist him; they were to gather information on Turkestan but for the time being were not allowed to cross the border. The British were particularly worried about the prisoners of war. According to estimates of the time, more than 30,000 German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners were held in Russian Central Asia, and it was feared that the Bolsheviks in Tashkent would arm them.

Mashhad soon became a base for further operations. In July General Wilfrid Malleson arrived there with a military mission, and in August soldiers of the 19th Punjabis crossed the border into Transcaspia to support the anti-Bolshevik government in Ashgabat. According to Monro, the troops from India in East Persia numbered about 4,000 men at the end of 1918, including six squadrons of cavalry and three and a half battalions of infantry.