Russians abandon Qasr-e Shirin

A British chronology of the war records under 8 July 1917 that the Russian troops began to withdraw from western Persia and abandoned Qasr-e Shirin, a border town on the road from Kermanshah to Baghdad. This entry needs qualification. According to F.J. Moberly’s British official history of the Mesopotamian campaign, the Russians had been giving up ground gradually since the end of May, and around 21 June General Frederick Stanley Maude reported to London that the Turks had already occupied both Kizil Ribat on the Diyala and Qasr-e Shirin. The war chronicle of the New York monthly Current History recorded only under 9 July that the Turks had reoccupied Penjwin, Khanaqin and Qasr-e Shirin. The date in the chronology therefore most probably reflects the moment when news of the Turkish successes reached the West, not the withdrawal itself. Nor did the Russians abandon the whole of western Persia at that time, for they still held Kermanshah and Hamadan.

Withdrawal into the hills

In the spring the Russians had retaken Qasr-e Shirin and reached Khanaqin, but the corps, commanded after Nikolai Baratov by General Pavlov, was growing weaker and weaker after the February Revolution. An attempt in May to force the Diyala ended in failure. On 26 May General Radatz, commander of the Russian advanced guard, informed Maude that he was leaving only 16 squadrons, four and a half battalions and six guns in the Qasr-e Shirin area and withdrawing the rest of his forces to Harunabad, deeper into Persia. As his reasons he gave Kurdish raids on his supply lines, the complete lack of food locally and sickness caused by the climate.

By mid-June most of the Russian troops from the Diyala were already standing below the Pa Tak pass, and only eight squadrons remained around Qasr-e Shirin. A Turkish brigade occupied Kizil Ribat, and a few days later the Turks also entered Qasr-e Shirin. At the end of June small Russian columns did occupy Penjwin, in the hills near Sulaymaniyah, but on 6 July the Turks forced them to withdraw. Moberly judges that this local offensive, whatever its purpose, changed little.

The British without cover

The Russian withdrawal exposed Maude’s right flank. The British expected a Turkish attempt to retake Baghdad. According to German and Turkish accounts cited by Moberly, the German Supreme Command had agreed in April to take responsibility for this expedition, and it was to be led by General Erich von Falkenhayn at the head of the Turkish-German army group “Yıldırım”. Maude believed that the enemy would most probably strike precisely at his right flank, so as to cut him off from the Russians and open the way to Persia. The Chief of the British Imperial General Staff, William Robertson, therefore proposed that most of Pavlov’s corps should move to the Diyala, under Maude’s orders and supply. Maude replied on 18 June that he could feed 14,000 men and 6,000 horses, who would hold the Diyala line from Qasr-e Shirin to Shahraban. Three days later, however, he had to report that the Russians were withdrawing further. He therefore sent a detachment of his III Corps to Balad Ruz, halfway from Baqubah to Mandali, to cover his right flank.

The British official and historian Arnold Wilson later wrote that the conduct of the Russian allies on the frontier, much worse than that of the Turks, gave German agents in Persia a weapon they were glad to use. In London, however, hope was not lost. On 12 July Robertson wrote to Maude that after the successes of the Kerensky Offensive the spirit of the Russian troops in Asia might improve. In July Baratov again took command of the corps in Persia, and Russian headquarters put forward a plan for an offensive on Mosul at the end of October, in which his soldiers were to return to the Diyala. It never took place. The Russian army was disintegrating ever faster, and after the October Revolution Baratov’s corps ceased to exist, and at the beginning of 1918 most of the Russian soldiers left Persia.