Persia in the First World War

Persia, the state of the Qajar shahs, declared strict neutrality at the start of the war but had no strength to defend it. Its north had been occupied by the Russians for years, in the south the British guarded the oilfields, and from the west Ottoman troops marched in. For four years the country was a battlefield for Russians, Turks and British, while German agents stirred up the tribes against the Entente. The war brought Persia destruction, the collapse of central authority and the great famine of 1917–1919, and the last foreign troops left the country only in 1921.

Spheres of influence and neutrality

In 1907 Britain and Russia divided Persia into spheres of influence, although the convention avoided the word. The Russian part in the north, with Tehran, was much larger than the British one in the south-east, and the belt in between remained open to both sides. Nobody asked the Persians for their opinion. From 1909 Russian troops were stationed in northern Persia, among other places in Tabriz and Qazvin.

In July 1914 the young Shah Ahmad came of age, and in August Mostowfi ol-Mamalek took over the government. On 1 November 1914 a decree of the shah declared the country’s strict neutrality. When the prime minister demanded the withdrawal of Russian troops from Azerbaijan, because their presence gave the Turks a pretext for invasion, the Russian envoy merely asked who could guarantee that the Turks would not move in once the Russians had gone.

Oil decided Persia’s importance for the war. From 1908 it was extracted on the lands of the Bakhtiari, and a pipeline carried it to the refinery at Abadan on the Shatt al-Arab. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company, in which the British government had held a majority stake since 1914, supplied fuel to the Royal Navy. To cover the refinery, the British landed at Fao on 6 November 1914, opening the Mesopotamian campaign. In February 1915 Arab tribes incited by agents of the Central Powers cut the pipeline north of Ahvaz, and a year later the British came to terms with the Bakhtiari khans on protecting the oilfields.

Persian Azerbaijan: the Russo-Turkish front

Russia’s war with the Ottoman Empire soon spread into north-western Persia. On the night of 2–3 January 1915 the Russians left Urmia, leaving the local Christians, Assyrians and Armenians, at the mercy of the Kurds and Ottoman troops. On 8 January the Kurds and Turks entered Tabriz. After their victory at Sarikamish the Russians returned to the city on 30 January and held it until early 1918.

In the spring Urmia was reached by regular Ottoman troops under Halil Bey. On 1 May 1915 they were repulsed at Dilman, and on 24 May the Russians returned to Urmia. Throughout this time the Christian villages by the lake fell victim to raids and massacres, and the historian Raymond Kévorkian counts the victims of the massacres in Persia in the toll of the Armenian genocide.

German agents and the war in the south

The Germans and Turks did not count on the government in Tehran and turned directly to the tribes. The most famous German agent was Wilhelm Wassmuss, the pre-war vice-consul in Bushehr, later called the “Persian Lawrence”. On 12 July 1915 tribesmen from Tangestan, talked into it by the Germans, attacked the British residency in Bushehr, killing two officers, and on 8 August the British occupied the town.

German missions also tried to cross Persia to Kabul to persuade the Emir of Afghanistan to go to war with Britain. Against them the British and Russians built the East Persia Cordon along the Afghan border from July 1915. The expedition of Oskar von Niedermayer and Werner Otto von Hentig nevertheless broke through the cordon and reached Kabul in the autumn, where the emir received the Germans politely but would not be drawn into the war.

The state lacked an armed force of its own. The gendarmerie, commanded by Swedish officers since 1911, sympathised with Germany and in 1915 drove the British and Russians out of many towns in the south, including Kerman and Shiraz.

The British answered with a new force. On 16 March 1916 General Percy Sykes landed at Bandar Abbas; he entered Kerman in June and Shiraz on 11 November, recruiting the South Persia Rifles along the way. The Persian government recognised them in March 1917, and the next cabinet withdrew that recognition.

Tehran, the emigration and the western front

In the autumn of 1915 Qazvin saw the arrival of the Russian expeditionary corps of General Nikolai Baratov. On 15 November the diplomats of the Central Powers left Tehran, counting on the shah following them and Persia entering the war on the side of Germany and Turkey. Ahmad, warned by the British and Russian envoys that he might lose his throne, stayed in the capital. Democrat deputies, journalists and part of the gendarmerie settled in Qom, where they formed a Committee of National Defence, and in 1916 a pro-German provisional government was set up in Kermanshah.

Baratov’s corps advanced along the road from Tehran towards Baghdad. On 14 December 1915 it took Hamadan, and on 26 February 1916 Kermanshah. The town was held by Persian opponents of the Entente and Ottoman battalions sent there by Field Marshal Colmar von der Goltz, but they abandoned it without a fight. In May Russian Cossacks reached the British on the Tigris.

In the same month Enver and Halil, instead of pursuing the British beaten at Kut, sent a corps into western Persia, which retook Kermanshah on 1 July and took Hamadan on 10 August. The Russians returned to both towns in March 1917. They entered Hamadan without a fight, a few days after the Turks had left.

The weak government in Tehran changed every few months. Mostowfi was followed by Moshir od-Dowleh, Ain od-Dowleh, Mostowfi again and Farmanfarma, whom the Entente trusted more than anyone in Tehran. Neutral Persia was drowning in debt, and in 1915 Britain and Russia agreed to pay it a monthly subsidy so that it would not go over to the Central Powers. In August 1916 Vosugh od-Dowleh, a man linked to the British, became prime minister.

Famine, revolution and Dunsterforce

The revolution in Russia broke up Baratov’s corps, and early in 1918 the Russian army left Persia. At the same time famine gripped the country. From 1916 droughts destroyed the harvests, and foreign armies requisitioned food and pack animals. By February 1918 famine reigned across the whole country, and in the towns crowds looted bakeries. Cholera, typhus and, from 1918, Spanish flu also killed. According to most estimates, about 2 million people died in 1917–1919. Mohammad Gholi Majd put the figure at 8–10 million, but historians have generally not accepted his numbers.

The British moved in where the Russians had been. On 27 January 1918 the mission of General Lionel Dunsterville set out from Baghdad to reach the Caucasus through Persia. On 17 February it got stuck at Enzeli, stopped by a Bolshevik committee and by the Jangalis of Mirza Kuchik Khan. The mission’s main armed force in northern Persia was the Cossacks of Lazar Bicherakhov.

Only after the defence of Rasht on 20 July was the road safe, and in August the British sailed to defend Baku, returning to Enzeli on 15 September. In the east a detachment of Indian troops set out from Mashhad towards Transcaspia, and in the north-west the Turks took Tabriz again.

The end of the war and the toll

The Armistice of Mudros of 30 October 1918 obliged the Turks to leave north-western Persia. But the war was not over for the Persians. The economy was ruined, the treasury empty, and regional movements broke out in Gilan, Azerbaijan and Khorasan. Only in 1921 did the last British troops leave the south of the country and the Red Army the north.

The British, the only great power left in the country, wanted to make Persia their client state. In 1919 the Persian delegation was not admitted to the Paris Peace Conference. In August of that year the government of Vosugh od-Dowleh concluded an agreement with Britain which its opponents saw as an attempt to subordinate the country. The Majlis never ratified it, and in 1921 formally rejected it.

The weakness of the state, laid bare by the war, opened the way to a new power. In February 1921 an officer of the Persian Cossack Brigade, Reza Khan, marched into Tehran and seized power, and in 1923 Ahmad Shah left for Europe and never returned. The toll of the war for a country that had not entered it was therefore heavy. Persians remember those years above all as a time of famine and epidemics, which claimed far more victims than the fighting.