Reports of the battle of Rajat

The British chronology of the war lists under 23 August 1916 the “battle of Rajat (Armenia)”, without giving any details. The location is misleading. Rajat (Rayat) is not in Armenia but in the mountains of Kurdistan, in what is now northern Iraq. It is a village and pass on the road from Rowanduz to the Persian frontier and on to Sauj Bulak, today Mahabad. The historians of the Caucasian wars W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff name the Rayat and Kelishin passes as the two routes by which one descended from Sauj Bulak into the Rowanduz valley. No battle fought there on that date could be confirmed, however, in any of the main studies.

Retreat from Rowanduz

The Russians had come into these mountains in the spring. On 15 May a column from Sauj Bulak took Rowanduz by storm, a few days’ march from Mosul. In June it beat off attacks by Kurds and units of the Turkish 4th Division. In the summer the situation changed. General Nikolai Baratov’s corps was retreating deeper into Persia and on 10 August lost Hamadan, while the Turks strengthened themselves in the Sulaymaniyah and Senna area. According to Allen and Muratoff, at the end of July two Turkish regiments with twelve guns appeared near Rowanduz. In their view the garrison could have held out, but the commander of the Caucasus Army, General Nikolai Yudenich, preoccupied with the fighting in Armenia and unconvinced of the whole Mosul direction, ordered the town to be evacuated. General Evgeny Maslovsky of that army’s staff writes that General Rybalchenko’s detachment, pressed by superior Turkish forces, withdrew gradually, fighting, until it was across the Persian frontier.

What the communiqués said

There was indeed fighting around Rajat, but earlier. The New York Times of 25 July 1916 quoted a Russian war communiqué according to which on 22 July superior Turkish forces attacked a Russian detachment at Rajat all day from the front and the flank, but were forced by fire and counter-attacks to give up the attack. In the autumn the American monthly Current History wrote in its survey of the war in Asia that the Russian left wing stood in the Rowanduz area and that a battle had been fought there ending in the defeat of the Turkish 4th Division and the capture of two of its regiments. Some later chronologies, based on the press of the time, state under 23 August that the Turks were beaten at Rajat and lost 2,300 prisoners.

What cannot be confirmed

These reports are confirmed neither by Allen and Muratoff nor by Maslovsky, who describe operations in this area in detail. Both speak of a retreat from Rowanduz, not of a Russian victory, and the capture of two regiments would have been an event hard to leave unrecorded. Russian communiqués from this front often exaggerated successes and reached the West late, so the chronology may have repeated a press report from a different day. It is impossible today to establish whether a larger engagement took place at Rajat on 23 August, or whether the entry refers to the July fighting or to rearguard skirmishes during the retreat into Persia.

All that is certain is that in the summer of 1916 the Russians withdrew from Rowanduz, and at the same time General Lewandowski’s detachment was pulled back from the Hakkari mountains. The Mosul direction, from which in the spring they had hoped to link up with the British in Mesopotamia, had for the time being ceased to exist for the Russians.