Russians abandon Urmia

On the night of 2/3 January 1915 Russian troops left Urmia and the surrounding plain on Lake Urmia in north-western Persia. The Russian withdrawal meant catastrophe for the Christians living there, Assyrians and Armenians. Thousands of them set out in the depths of winter after the departing troops, while those who stayed found themselves at the mercy of the Kurds and the Ottoman forces.

Russians in neutral Persia

Persia had declared neutrality in the war, but foreign troops had been stationed on its soil for years. Russia, which under the 1907 agreement with Britain regarded the north of the country as its sphere of influence, had taken advantage of internal unrest in Persia to occupy Tabriz in 1909, and Urmia and Khoy in 1910. These garrisons controlled the province of Azerbaijan and guarded the road from the Russian border on the Aras towards Turkish Van.

The Urmia plain was one of the main centres of Christian population in Persia. According to the American missionary William Shedd, at the beginning of 1915 nearly 35,000 Christians lived here, including refugees from Turkey, most of them Assyrians, members of the Church of the East and other denominations, as well as several thousand Armenians. The borderland had been restless since the start of the war. In October 1914 Kurds, led according to later accounts by Turkish officers, attacked Urmia. When Russia and Turkey went to war in November, the Russians closed the Turkish consulates, expelled Sunni Kurds from villages near Urmia and distributed some weapons to the Christians. At the end of December the first clashes with Turkish and Kurdish units took place by Lake Urmia.

The order to withdraw

The fate of Urmia, however, was decided far to the north. At the end of December, in the worst days of the Battle of Sarikamish, General Alexander Myshlayevsky, commanding at the front, feared that the Turks would cut off the Russian units in Persia from the Caucasus. He therefore ordered them to withdraw from Azerbaijan towards the border. The order was carried out in haste. According to the missionaries’ accounts, the inhabitants of the northern part of the plain learned of the troops’ departure at about ten in the evening on Saturday 2 January, and before midnight the exodus began.

Flight

The Christians abandoned their homes, livestock and belongings. Most went on foot, through snow and mud, to Julfa on the Aras, where the Russian railway began. The journey took about a week. Along the way they were joined by thousands of Armenians from neighbouring Salmas, abandoned by the Russians a day or two later. Many of the refugees, especially the old and children, died of exhaustion and cold, and more died of disease in the camps in Russian Transcaucasia. The number of refugees from Urmia alone is uncertain. Shedd wrote of 8,000–10,000 people, and another American missionary, Frederick Jessup of Tabriz, of 17,000–18,000.

Under occupation

About 25,000 Christians remained on the plain. Kurds and Turkish volunteers entered the abandoned Urmia. According to some sources, the Ottoman detachment of Ömer Naci occupied the town on 4 January. Muslim neighbours and Kurdish horsemen looted and burned Christian villages. Thousands of people took refuge in the town, in the missions: about 17,000 in the compounds of the American Presbyterian mission, over which the flag of the United States was raised, and about 3,000 in the French Catholic mission of the Lazarists. Some Christians were hidden by sympathetic Persian Muslims.

The occupation of Urmia lasted nearly five months. According to Shedd, during that time more than a thousand Christians were murdered, and at least four thousand died of typhus and typhoid fever, which spread in the overcrowded shelters. The Russians returned to Tabriz as early as the end of January, but to Urmia only on 24 May 1915. Historians count the events of that winter among the beginnings of the Assyrian genocide.