British take Kirkuk

At dawn on 7 May 1918 soldiers of the British advance guard saw smoke from fires rising over Kirkuk. All through the rainy night explosions had boomed in the town: the Turks were burning the ammunition they could not take with them, and by midnight they had all gone. According to the British official history (Moberly), Colonel Deane’s detachment, made up of part of the 12th Cavalry, a battalion of the 6th East Lancashire, machine guns and two guns, entered the abandoned town at 8.45 a.m. Patrols of the 6th Cavalry Brigade soon arrived there as well. The British chronology of the war records under that date: “Kirkuk occupied by British troops”, and at once refers to 24 May, when the British left the town.

The road to Kirkuk

The expedition into southern Kurdistan began on 24 April. Columns of Lieutenant-General R. G. Egerton’s III Corps, commanded in the field by Major-General W. de S. Cayley of the 13th Division, struck at the scattered Turkish XIII Corps. On 27 April at the village of Kulawand British and Indian cavalry charged and broke the retreating Turkish garrisons of Ain Faris and Kara Tepe: according to Edmund Candler, a correspondent with the army, more than 150 Turks were killed and 538 taken prisoner. A day later the British took Kifri without a fight, and on 29 April in three hours they captured the position on the Aq Su river at Tuz Khurmatu (Tuz Khurmatli). Moberly states that they buried more than 200 Turkish dead there and took 1,300 prisoners (Candler writes of 1,200), 12 guns and 20 machine guns, at a cost of 194 men of their own.

The commander in Mesopotamia, General William Marshall, after his March victory on the Euphrates, did not intend to go further into Kurdistan than Tuz. That was changed by a telegram from London of 29 April. The War Office was convinced that the Turks, already masters of almost all of Transcaucasia, wanted to occupy Persian Azerbaijan, and that German agents were preparing a rising against the British in Persia. It decided that the best remedy would be a strong blow towards Kirkuk and Sulaymaniyah, which would force the Turkish XIII Corps to draw in troops intended for Persia, impress the government in Tehran and Afghanistan, and make it easier for General Lionel Dunsterville’s mission to recruit local units. Marshall replied on 2 May that he was preparing to take the town, but recommended that Tuz remain the furthest outpost. Holding Kirkuk permanently would require supplying it from Tikrit, extending the railway and building fortified posts in the summer heat. On III Corps’ side Kirkuk lay about 190 kilometres from the railhead, along a road crossed by river beds in places a mile and a half wide, and the operation alone required putting the whole corps on reduced rations.

The advance from Tuz began on 4 May. On 6 May the troops passed the village of Taza without a fight, and in the evening a downpour began that washed out the roads. At 6.40 a.m. on 7 May Egerton, convinced that operations could not be conducted in such weather, ordered that they be confined to reconnaissance and put the troops on half rations. The storm, however, had cut communications, and the order reached Cayley only at ten o’clock, four and a half hours after the advance guard had set off, when Deane’s detachment was already in the town.

In the town

Candler found Kirkuk being looted. Men, women and children were carrying furniture and household goods from the Turkish government quarter across the bridge over the Khasa Su river to the Kurdish quarter, like “a crowd coming away from an auction”. The British posted a guard at the bridge. The last act of the Turks was to blow up an old Christian church which according to both British authors dated from the 4th century. The Turks had kept ammunition in it, and the Germans had buried their dead there. In the town three damaged aircraft, a good deal of ammunition and about 600 sick and wounded Turks fell into British hands. The population was starving. The Turks had taken all the grain, even the seed corn, and the sheep had been slaughtered during lambing, so the British opened soup kitchens, to which the soldiers contributed part of their own already reduced rations.

On 8 May, when the roads had dried a little, a reconnaissance on the road to Altun Köprü found, more than 20 kilometres beyond the town, the remains of Turkish transport, eight German lorries with artillery ammunition and two mountain guns, and by the road the bodies of Turkish soldiers who had died of hunger and exhaustion. On 10 May General Holland-Pryor’s column pushed the Turkish rearguards back across the Little Zab. Marshall reported on 12 May that the remnants of the Turkish 2nd Division had escaped across the river, beyond the reach of pursuit.

The withdrawal

In keeping with what Marshall had written on 2 May, the British did not stay in the town for long. Throughout the operation they struggled with a lack of supplies: on 9 May the troops at Kirkuk were ordered to eat their iron rations. The first units set off on the return march as early as 11 May, and a small mobile detachment was left in the town, which departed on 24 May. With it, at their own request, went about 1,600 inhabitants who feared the Turks’ return. By the end of the month III Corps’ furthest outposts again stood at Tuz Khurmatu and Kifri. Marshall sent the transport released from Kurdistan to the road to Hamadan to support Dunsterforce in Persia. The expedition brought the British prisoners and booty and weakened the Turks in Kurdistan, and according to Candler the soldiers even managed to gather the grain from the fertile fields around the town. Kirkuk returned to Ottoman hands. The British took it again only on 25 October 1918, in the last days of the war.