Russians halt before Khanaqin

The British chronology of the war records under 15 May 1916 that Russian troops occupied Khanaqin, a town in Ottoman Iraq just beyond the Persian border, about 130 kilometres by road north-east of Baghdad, and that they left it on 5 June. Other sources do not confirm this. The British official history of the Mesopotamian campaign, W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff’s history of the Caucasian wars, the work of General Evgeny Maslovsky of the Caucasus Army staff and the memoirs of the British political officer Arnold Wilson all agree in showing that in May 1916 Khanaqin was in Turkish hands. The Russians stood before it but did not capture it.

A Turkish base

Khanaqin lay on the Diyala, on the main road from Baghdad to Kermanshah and Tehran. As early as the spring, Field Marshal Colmar von der Goltz, commander of the Ottoman Sixth Army, had set up a forward base here for the units defending the Persian border. When at the beginning of May General Nikolai Baratov’s corps took Qasr-e Shirin, four battalions of Shevket Bey’s Turkish 6th Division fell back precisely to Khanaqin and dug in on a prepared position. According to the British official history, the Russians at that time estimated the enemy forces at Khanaqin at 2,000 horsemen and six to eight infantry battalions.

After the surrender of Kut the Turks could take troops away from the Tigris. The British established that around 9 May a Turkish cavalry brigade of about 700 sabres with two guns, and ten battalions of the 2nd Division with twelve guns, had left Kut for the Persian border. General Percy Lake, commander of the British forces in Mesopotamia, passed this information on to Baratov. In mid-May in Baghdad Enver Pasha decided that instead of pursuing the British in the south, the Sixth Army would strike at Persia. He divided it into two corps, and Ali Ihsan Pasha’s XIII Corps, made up of the 2nd and 6th Divisions and a cavalry brigade, was to crush Baratov.

An order to wait

On 16 May General Lake learned that the Russians had taken Rawanduz in the north, but also that Baratov had reported a very strong Turkish position at Khanaqin and had been instructed not to attack it for the time being. His corps, no more than 5,000 men, mostly cavalry, was suffering from heat, lack of water and fodder, dysentery and cholera. Maslovsky writes that the Russians stood idle around Qasr-e Shirin, watching the enemy, and that the Turks did not attack either.

So at Khanaqin there was no capture of the town but a battle at the beginning of June. Baratov attacked before the Turks had concentrated all their forces there, reckoning that after a victory it would be easier for him to fall back into the healthier mountains. According to Allen and Muratoff, and to Maslovsky, who gives the date as 21 May by the Julian calendar, the attack was made on 3 June. The British official history speaks of 1 June. The attack failed, the Russians lost about 500 men, and a few days later XIII Corps entered Persia. The Russians did not take Khanaqin until the beginning of April 1917, when after the fall of Baghdad the Turks were withdrawing from Persia.