Kermanshah in the First World War

Kermanshah was the chief city of western Persia and lay on the most important road from Baghdad to Tehran. Persia declared neutrality in the war, but Russians, Turks and British fought for this road. At the turn of 1915 and 1916 Kermanshah was the centre of Persian nationalists allied with Germany; it then passed three times from Russian to Turkish hands and back, and in 1918 it became a stage on the British route to the Caspian Sea. The war left the city and its surroundings ruined by requisitions and famine.

Gateway to the Zagros (1914–1915)

The road from Baghdad ran through Khanaqin and Qasr-e Shirin on the frontier, climbed by the Pai Tak pass into the Zagros mountains and led through Kermanshah to Hamadan and on to the capital. Whoever held it could enter the heart of Persia from Mesopotamia, or threaten the rear of the armies in Mesopotamia from Persia. Merchant caravans also used it, as did pilgrims bound for the Shia shrines in Iraq. Martin Donohoe, a member of the British expedition to Persia, wrote that before the war as many as 200,000 pilgrims passed this way every year.

As early as 1915 the city fell within the Central Powers’ sphere of influence. In the spring a Turkish detachment under Hüseyin Rauf Bey occupied Qasr-e Shirin and several small towns on the road to Kermanshah, and its withdrawal was negotiated through the German consul Schünemann. On 26 August the same consul, with several hundred tribal horsemen, stopped the British and Russian consuls near Kangavar as they travelled to Kermanshah, and forced them to turn back to Hamadan.

Seat of the émigrés (1915–1916)

In November 1915 Persian democrats, journalists and part of the gendarmerie left Tehran together with the envoys of the Central Powers. When the Russians took Hamadan, Kermanshah became their main centre. On 10 December gendarmes under Swedish command seized the government offices, the post office and the telegraph, and the governor sent from Tehran preferred to leave rather than work with the nationalists. On 2 January 1916 Field Marshal Colmar von der Goltz arrived here, and Ottoman battalions came up from Mesopotamia. Power passed to Nezam os-Saltaneh, a former governor of Lorestan, who formed a pro-German provisional government.

A fortified line at Bid-e Sorkh barred the road to the city. After General Nikolai Baratov’s Russians took Kangavar, they outflanked it from the south through Nahavand and broke through the defences at Sahneh and Bisotun. On 26 February 1916 they entered an abandoned Kermanshah. The émigrés, gendarmes, Germans and Turks fell back to Qasr-e Shirin.

Changing hands (1916–1917)

From Kermanshah Baratov advanced towards the frontier in the spring, and in May his Cossacks reached the British on the Tigris. After the surrender of Kut, however, Enver Pasha sent the whole XIII Corps of Ali Ihsan Bey into Persia. The Russians were driven back from Kerend, and on 1 July 1916 the Turks entered the city, abandoned without a fight during the night. The émigrés and Nezam os-Saltaneh’s government returned with them, and on 10 August Ali Ihsan took Hamadan.

After the fall of Baghdad the XIII Corps had to withdraw from Persia. On 11 March 1917, the day on which the British entered Baghdad, the Russians, after fighting the Turkish rearguard, took Kermanshah again. Soon news arrived of the revolution in Petrograd, which within a few months broke up Baratov’s corps.

Famine and the British (1918)

At the turn of January and February 1918 the Russians were leaving the city. Only the Cossacks of Lazar Bicherakhov stayed behind to cover the withdrawal. On 3 February General Dunsterville’s mission, bound for the Caucasus, passed through Kermanshah. The country was devastated: Dunsterville saw by the road the bodies of people who had died of exhaustion, and Donohoe wrote that the Turks and Russians had stripped the area of everything, that there was no seed grain and the fields had not been sown.

On 24 March the first British detachment arrived: fifty soldiers of the Hampshire Regiment with the consul, Kennion. From then on the British guarded the road from Mesopotamia through Kermanshah and Hamadan to the Caspian Sea, along which the units of Dunsterforce passed in the spring, and from Hamadan they set off for Baku in the summer. Dunsterville’s mission also tried to relieve the famine by hiring the starving to repair the roads. According to Donohoe, grain rotted in the stores in Kermanshah while people died of hunger in the neighbouring provinces, because carrying it to Baghdad or Tehran cost three times what it was worth locally.