The East Persian Cordon is extended

The British chronology of the war records under 1 February 1918 the beginning of the extension of the East Persian Cordon into Khorasan, the north-eastern province of Persia. Since 1915 a chain of posts and patrols along the border with Afghanistan had been meant to stop the German and Turkish missions trying to reach Kabul. From the start the cordon had been divided: the northern sector, from Mashhad towards Birjand, was held by the Russians, mainly Cossacks, and the southern, from Birjand to Sistan, by the troops of British India. Now the Russians were leaving, and the Indians were to take their place. The chronology adds that the aim was to replace the Russian cordon, withdrawn on the orders of the Bolshevik government.

The collapse had begun earlier. According to F. J. Moberly’s British official history of the Mesopotamian campaign, in the autumn of 1917 chaos reigned in Russian Turkestan, mutinies broke out, and the unrest also spread to the Russian soldiers on the northern sector of the cordon. At the beginning of November the British representative in Mashhad, the most important British observation post for Khorasan, eastern Afghanistan and Russian Central Asia, was instructed to expand his intelligence service. At the end of December the Government of India asked London for permission to move the British cordon north. As the British scholar Michael Sargent summarises the India Office documents, it justified this by the need to replace the departing Russians, to control agitation hostile to the British and to protect the roads, and above all by fear of the prisoners of war. According to contemporary estimates more than 30,000 German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners were held in Central Asia, and with Russia’s exit from the war they might regain their freedom and their weapons.

Permission was given at the beginning of January. The cordon was to reach north as far as Sarakhs on the Persian border with Russian Turkestan. Reinforcements, road repairs and the recruitment of some 700 more local volunteers for auxiliary units were planned. Moberly writes that India was to take over the whole cordon and to send military missions into Russian Turkestan via Mashhad and Kashgar. On 2 February the Indian Army Department proposed two such centres, at Mashhad and at Kashgar, and wanted to put General Wilfrid Malleson at the head of the first. The core of the cordon’s troops was still made up of units known from 1915–1917, including the 28th Light Cavalry and the 19th Punjabis. Supplies came from Quetta by the railway through Baluchistan, which was being extended towards the Persian border during the war, and then along a long, poor road through Sistan to Birjand.

The British also watched Afghanistan with concern. The Emir Habibullah Khan maintained a friendly neutrality, but there was a strong pro-Turkish party in Kabul, and some Afghans hoped that the chaos in Russia would allow them to recover the lands lost to it in 1885. The cordon was therefore to screen Afghanistan not only from German and Turkish agents but also from Bolshevik propaganda.

The advance north went slowly, through the deserts and mountains of eastern Persia. The chronology states that the cordon’s troops occupied Mashhad on 3 March, while according to Sargent its posts had reached it by 14 March. In the summer of 1918 Malleson arrived in Mashhad, and soldiers from the cordon, including the Punjabis and the Indian cavalry, went with him to fight the Bolsheviks across the border, in Russian Transcaspia.