Russians take Kangavar

On 13 January 1916 units of General Nikolai Baratov’s Russian corps, after a more serious fight, captured Kangavar, a small town in western Persia roughly halfway from Hamadan to Kermanshah. This date is given by General Yevgeny Maslovsky’s work on the war in the Caucasus, published in emigration in 1933, and by Allen and Muratoff’s history of the Caucasian wars. The British chronology of the war places the capture of Kangavar much earlier, under 25 December 1915, and the British official history of the Mesopotamian campaign, based on reports of the time, also records it in the last week of December. The discrepancy most probably arises because Russian patrols had already reached Kangavar by then but were unable to hold it. A British appreciation of the situation from the end of January 1916 states that the column from Hamadan had fought at Kangavar against the Turks, who first captured the town and were then driven out of it. The Iranian historian Iraj Nasseri writes that Kangavar changed hands several times.

A winter pass

After the capture of Hamadan in mid-December, some of the defeated Persian gendarmes, tribal volunteers and a few hundred Turkish soldiers fell back to the pass near Asadabad, on the road to Kermanshah. A good position in the mountains was their only advantage over the Russians. Otherwise they lacked everything. The area around Asadabad is among the coldest in Persia, the pass was covered with deep snow, and many gendarmes had not received winter uniforms and froze in summer ones. The Russians meanwhile were concentrating their forces: between 15 and 20 December the Caucasian Cavalry Division reached Hamadan, and battalions of frontier guard infantry were marching from Qazvin. On 25 December dragoons and Cossacks clashed with the enemy near Asadabad. According to Maslovsky they then occupied the town and set off towards Kangavar. Nasseri, relying on Persian sources, dates the final capture of Asadabad only to mid-January. The British, worried about the fate of the division besieged in Kut, pressed through Petrograd for Baratov to push on as quickly as possible towards Kermanshah.

The fight for Kangavar

Kangavar was not a place of indifference to the British and the Russians. On 26 August 1915 the German consul in Kermanshah, Schünemann, with a few hundred tribal horsemen, surrounded here the British and Russian consuls, who with an escort of Persian and Russian Cossacks were travelling from Hamadan to Kermanshah. After an exchange of fire in which several men were killed, the consuls had to turn back. In January 1916 the road through Kangavar was defended by the German military attaché, Count Georg von Kanitz. He had gathered gendarmes, Lurs and other volunteers, and was supported by a Turkish battalion from the forces sent into Persia from Mesopotamia. At the beginning of January Field Marshal Colmar von der Goltz passed through Kermanshah, bringing with him Colonel Bopp’s German military mission.

On 13 January the Russians attacked. According to Allen and Muratoff, Kanitz’s detachments were easily dispersed and the Turks withdrew with losses. Maslovsky writes that Kangavar was taken from the Turks. The defenders fell back westwards to a fortified line at Bid-e Sorkh, where the Germans had trenches dug and the Persian nationalists and Turks were bringing up reinforcements.

The fate of Kanitz

A few days later Kanitz himself disappeared in the mountains near Kangavar. German sources give 15 January as the date of his disappearance. Allen and Muratoff supposed that he had been killed by his own volunteers. Nasseri, citing the account of a Persian officer who accompanied him, believes that the attaché, broken by failure, sent his companions away with letters to Bopp and took his own life. The line at Bid-e Sorkh held for several more weeks. At the end of February 1916 the Russians broke through it and took Kermanshah.