Russians retake Hamadan

On 2 March 1917, 17 February by the Julian calendar then used by the Russians, the troops of General Nikolai Baratov returned to Hamadan in western Persia. This date is given unanimously by the British chronology of the war, by F.J. Moberly’s British official history of the Mesopotamian campaign and by the British Annual Register for 1917. Nobody fought for the town itself. According to W.E.D. Allen and Paul Muratoff’s history of the Caucasian wars, the Ottoman 6th Division had begun withdrawing from Hamadan as early as 24 February, and the 2nd Division followed it on 26 February. The Russians thus entered a town the Turks had left a few days before.

Half a year of Turkish occupation

Hamadan had been in Ottoman hands since August 1916, when Ali Ihsan Bey’s XIII Corps took the town and pushed the Russians back onto the road to Qazvin. After that the Persian front fell quiet. Allen and Muratoff write that from August to the end of the year the Turkish corps stood around Hamadan, sent patrols along the roads to Qazvin and Tehran, and covered its flanks with small detachments at Senna, today’s Sanandaj, and around Burujerd. It was decimated by epidemics. Ali Ihsan had no more than 10,000 effective soldiers and did not dare to march on Tehran. In December the Minister of War, Enver Pasha, proclaimed the creation of a Persian national army, but according to the same authors the units of former gendarmes, volunteers and Lurs gathered at Burujerd never exceeded 8,000 men of doubtful value.

The Russians were not idle either. Moberly writes that from December rumours had been coming in of the Turks’ imminent departure from Hamadan. On 1 January 1917 Baratov attacked along the whole front to find out whether they were true. After three days of fighting, interrupted by snowstorms, and the loss of about 300 men, he satisfied himself that the Turks were staying put. His corps, renamed the 1st Caucasian Cavalry Corps, had meanwhile received reinforcements: according to Allen and Muratoff, the newly formed 9th Turkestan Rifle Brigade and the experienced Frontier Brigade. Altogether he had about 15,000 infantry in sixteen battalions, sixty squadrons and sotnias, and thirty guns. Baratov decided not to attack Hamadan frontally but to send a strong column from Qazvin through Zanjan to Bijar, and from there on Senna and Kermanshah. The march into the enemy’s rear was to force the Turks to give up Hamadan without a fight. In winter, however, through the mountains of Persian Kurdistan, it advanced slowly.

Decided on the Tigris

The fate of Hamadan was settled by fighting far to the west. In January the British under General Frederick Stanley Maude began pushing the Turks back from Kut. According to Allen and Muratoff, as early as 21 January Ali Ihsan received a telegraphed order to send all available forces to help the commander of the Sixth Army, Halil Pasha (Halil Kut), and one regiment set out from Kermanshah towards Baghdad. In mid-February the order came to withdraw the whole corps. When on 24 February the British recovered Kut and Maude set off in pursuit up the Tigris, the matter became urgent. The British official history, citing the memoirs of the Turkish officer Muhammad Amin, writes that Halil, who returned to Baghdad on 26 February, lost hope of holding the city and sent the commander of XIII Corps a firm order to lead his troops to Khanaqin on the border with Iraq.

The Russians reached Bijar at the end of January and in February moved on Senna, from which the Turkish covering force fell back partly on Kermanshah and partly on Sulaymaniyah. Around 20 February Baratov’s main forces were ready to march on Hamadan, but the Turks were already leaving. Ali Ihsan had foreseen this turn of events and prepared his line of retreat in advance. Allen and Muratoff stress that he took his corps about 300 miles (almost 500 kilometres) through the mountains and along bad roads in three weeks. Baratov could not keep pace with him, because he had to organise supply along the way, first between Qazvin and Hamadan, then further west.

Pursuit towards Kermanshah

In London the news was received with hope. On 4 March the Chief of the British Imperial General Staff informed Maude that Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, commanding in the Caucasus, had instructed Baratov and the commander of the second Russian group in Persia, General Chernozubov, to co-operate with the British as fully as possible. Baratov, who had “taken Hamadan on 2 March”, did not yet have all his reinforcements but was to advance from Bijar and through Hamadan. His columns marched through deep snow along roads destroyed by the retreating Turks. On 5 March they took Kangavar and Sahneh, and at the next stage the objective was Kermanshah.

Hamadan had changed hands for the second time in a year and a half. The town and the surrounding villages were exhausted by the requisitions of both armies. The British official and historian of the Mesopotamian campaign Arnold Wilson later observed that the poverty prevailing around Kermanshah and Hamadan led the following year to one of the most terrible famines in Persian history.