Ottoman troops occupy Qasr-e Shirin

On 15 December 1915, the day after the Russians took Hamadan, Ottoman troops entered Qasr-e Shirin (in Polish transcription also Ghasr-e Szirin), the first Persian town beyond the border with Ottoman Iraq. The date is given by the British official history of the Mesopotamian campaign and by the British chronology of the war. Qasr-e Shirin lay about 175 kilometres north-east of Baghdad, at the mouth of the only convenient passage through the Zagros mountains. For centuries the road from Baghdad through Khanaqin, Kermanshah and Hamadan to Tehran had run this way. Whoever held it could enter the heart of Persia from Mesopotamia, or strike from Persia at the rear of the forces in Mesopotamia.

It was not the first time the Turks had come here. In the spring of 1915 the detachment of Hüseyin Rauf Bey, the future prime minister of Turkey, originally intended for an expedition to Afghanistan, crossed the border and occupied Qasr-e Shirin and several small towns on the road to Kermanshah. There was bloody fighting with the inhabitants of the small town of Kerend, and the government in Tehran protested. Through the mediation of the German consul in Kermanshah, Schünemann, the two sides reached an agreement and the Turks withdrew across the border in the summer. Kermanshah, however, remained in the hands of the Entente’s opponents, and the British and Russian consuls had to move to Hamadan.

In the autumn the situation changed. Field Marshal Colmar von der Goltz, who had arrived at Kut on 12 December, commanded all the Ottoman forces south of Mosul, including the operations in Persia. The Persian nationalists who in November had left Tehran and gathered in Qom, and the German agents led by the military attaché Count Georg von Kanitz, had long been asking for Turkish troops. The offensive of Nikolai Baratov’s corps, which was approaching Hamadan, made this help urgent. According to Allen and Muratoff’s history of the Caucasian wars, Goltz first sent one battalion of regular infantry with a mountain battery to Kermanshah, and soon three more. The Turkish author Mehmed Emin, cited by the British official history, wrote that at this time almost 2,000 infantry and four guns were sent back to Baghdad from the forces besieging Kut. He called it the “lamentable Persian adventure”.

The occupation of Qasr-e Shirin opened the road to Kermanshah for these units; the town became the centre of the Persian emigration and of German activity. The help, however, was modest. At the beginning of 1916 the leader of the Persian nationalists, Nezam os-Saltaneh, complained in a telegram to the Persian envoy in Berlin that so far only 2,000 Ottoman soldiers and 500 old rifles had arrived. In London the Turkish movements nevertheless caused concern. On 20 December General Edmund Barrow of the India Office considered whether Goltz, while keeping Kut under siege, might move elsewhere with part of his forces, among other things through Khanaqin towards Persia, in response to the Russian march on Hamadan. The field marshal himself left for Kermanshah at the end of December, where according to the Iranian historian Iraj Nasseri he arrived on 2 January 1916.

The Turkish expedition did not stop the Russians. At the end of February 1916 Baratov took Kermanshah, and the Persian émigrés, gendarmes and Turks fell back as far as Qasr-e Shirin. In May the Russians entered that town too. In the summer, after the surrender of Kut, the Ottoman XIII Corps, now freed, went over to the counter-offensive and recovered western Persia as far as Hamadan.