Russians retake Urmia

On 24 May 1915 Russian troops returned to Urmia in north-western Persia. They did not have to fight. The last Ottoman and Kurdish units had left the town a few days earlier, after Halil Bey’s defeat at Dilman. So ended an occupation of almost five months, which had begun when the Russians withdrew from Urmia at the beginning of January.

The Turks and Kurds leave

Beaten at Dilman on 1 May, Halil Bey, who in mid-April had brought a regular Ottoman army to Urmia, was unable to hold Persian Azerbaijan. His units were withdrawing west, towards the Ottoman border. According to a letter by the American missionary Mrs J.P. Cochran, written on 20 May, the Turks and Kurds had “got up and gone” the day before. William Shedd, head of the American mission, stated that the last Ottoman troops left the town on 20 May. For several days Urmia was without foreign troops, and order was kept by the Persian governor. The missionaries wrote that local Muslims were still killing Christians who were returning to their ruined villages.

The Russians return

According to Shedd, the Russians reoccupied Urmia on 24 May. It was the beginning of a larger operation. The commander of the Caucasus Army, General Nikolai Yudenich, sent a strong cavalry force into Azerbaijan, with a dragoon division and a Cossack brigade, under General Charpentier. Its march was meant to intimidate the Kurdish tribes and restore Russian prestige in the country. According to Russian studies the raid set off on 22 May, and its units entered Urmia at the end of May or the beginning of June. Russian military works give 31 May, while the historians W.E.D. Allen and Paul Muratoff give 2 June. The picture is further clouded by a letter from an Assyrian clergyman in Urmia, Y.M. Nisan, dated 25 or 26 May, which says that the Russian army is “not far off” and that there is talk of its return.

The toll of the occupation

For the Christians of Urmia, the Assyrians and Armenians, the return of the Russians meant the end of an occupation that had cost them thousands of lives. Since January thousands of people had been crowded into the grounds of the American and French missions. In the American college alone Mrs Cochran counted seven hundred fresh graves of victims of typhoid fever. According to Shedd, between 2 January and 24 May more than a thousand Christians were murdered in Urmia and its surroundings, and at least four thousand died of disease. Nisan wrote of about 6,000 killed in raids on villages. These figures are uncertain, but all the accounts describe a catastrophe. Historians count these events as part of the Assyrian genocide.

News from the missionaries, cut off from the world for almost five months, reached Europe and America and in 1916 was included in the British “Blue Book” on the treatment of the Armenians and other Christians in the Ottoman Empire and Persia.