Russians take Kerend

The British chronology of the war records under 17 March 1917 that Russian troops occupied Kerend (Karind in British sources). It was a small town in the Zagros mountains, on the main road from Kermanshah to Baghdad, about 100 kilometres west of Kermanshah. The sources do not give the exact day the Russians entered it. F.J. Moberly’s British official history of the Mesopotamian campaign says only that on 20 March General Frederick Stanley Maude learned that the Russians had reached Kerend and had moved on from it on 18 March. The date in the chronology is therefore plausible. For the Russians it was 4 March in the Julian calendar.

Kerend had already changed hands before. In March 1916 a Russian detachment briefly reached it, at the end of April the Russians drove the Turks out, and in June they themselves had to withdraw after a lost fight on the plateau near the town. Now the roles were reversed once again. After the capture of Kermanshah on 11 March, General Nikolai Baratov’s corps was following the retreating Turkish XIII Corps of Ali Ihsan Bey, which was hurrying to Mesopotamia to help its Sixth Army. According to Turkish figures cited by Moberly, the head of the corps had passed Kerend as early as 9 March, while its rearguard, the Ottoman 2nd Division, was holding up the Russians near Kermanshah.

The pursuit went slowly. Snow lay in the mountains, and the retreating Turks were destroying the roads and, as was reported to London, carrying off supplies, animals and people from the area. The Russian infantry was left far behind, in Kermanshah and on the road to Hamadan, and the Turks were pursued mainly by Cossack regiments. A Russian war communiqué of 17 March reported that a Turkish column of two battalions, six mountain guns and three squadrons, retreating from Senneh, today’s Sanandaj, had been intercepted by Russian cavalry and had fled into the trackless mountains. Meanwhile the monarchy in Russia had already fallen. The abdication of Nicholas II and the Petrograd Soviet’s Order No. 1 were soon to reach the soldiers in Persia as well.

From the other side came the British. On 18 March, as the Russians were leaving Kerend, General Edwardes’s British column crossed the Diyala and occupied Baqubah, north-east of Baghdad, without a fight. Maude wanted to cut off the Turks and, in cooperation with the Russians, trap XIII Corps between two armies. West of Kerend, however, the road led through a gorge below the Pa Tak pass, a natural defensive position which the Turks had fortified in advance. There Ali Ihsan decided to halt the pursuit.