Russians take Khanaqin

The British chronology of the war records under 4 April 1917 that Russian troops reoccupied Khanaqin, a town in Ottoman Iraq just across the Persian border, on the river Diyala, on the road from Baghdad to Kermanshah. The Russians, however, had been there a few days earlier. According to the history of the Caucasian wars by W.E.D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, the advance guard of General Radatz’s column appeared in Khanaqin on 2 April. The British official history of the Mesopotamian campaign by F.J. Moberly states that as early as 1 April ten squadrons with two guns moved from Qasr-e Shirin to Dekke, where the Turks had built a bridge over the Diyala, about 20 kilometres south-west of the town. The entry in the chronology most likely reflects the day on which the news reached the West.

A year earlier, in May 1916, General Nikolai Baratov’s corps had halted before Khanaqin but had not taken it. This time the town offered no resistance. The Turkish XIII Corps of Ali Ihsan Bey, which had been withdrawing from Persia since the beginning of March, had already crossed the Diyala. Its commander had held the Russians at the Pai Tak pass and the British on the Jabal Hamrin ridge, and had managed to slip out of the pincers. Radatz’s appearance at Khanaqin nevertheless mattered. Allen and Muratoff write that it wrecked the plan of the commander of the Sixth Army, Halil Pasha (Halil Kut), who at the end of March had tried to strike at the British right wing on the Diyala. The Turks fell back to the west bank of the river, and the main body of XIII Corps halted at Kifri.

An ally at the end of its strength

On 2 April a sotnia of Cossacks met the British at Qizil Ribat, a few dozen kilometres down the Diyala. The same day a British officer flew from Baghdad to the Pai Tak pass and delivered a letter from General Frederick Stanley Maude to General Pavlov, who had just taken over command of the 1st Caucasian Cavalry Corps from Baratov. Maude proposed a division of tasks: the Russians were to pursue XIII Corps towards Kifri, while the British dealt with the Turkish XVIII Corps on the Tigris, on the way to Samarra.

The British liaison officer with the Russians, Lieutenant-Colonel Rowlandson, who arrived in Baghdad on 3 April, had no illusions. In his opinion the Russian units were neither organised enough nor in a fit state to conduct effective operations. The men had long been on reduced rations, the horses were fed on oak leaves, and the column had almost no transport and little ammunition. Radatz, moreover, considered that his task was to drive the Turks out of Persia and had no intention of going beyond the Diyala. On 4 April Rowlandson set off back to the Russians with 46 lorries of food that Maude was sending to his allies.

The effects of the revolution

The main cause of this weakness was the February Revolution. Allen and Muratoff write that news of it quickly reached the headquarters at Kermanshah and within a few days spread among the soldiers. The Cossacks, the frontier regiments and the long-service soldiers long remained resistant to agitation. The least reliable proved to be the elite dragoon regiments and the rear services, which were the first to make contact with the revolutionary committees in the Caucasus and in Russia. Under pressure from the Soviets, the Provisional Government replaced commanders regarded as too conservative. Baratov was replaced by Pavlov, and the commander of the troops at Lake Urmia, General Chernozubov, by General Vadbolsky. British reports spoke of riots in the garrisons of Kars and Sarikamish.

On 6 April the British Chief of the Imperial General Staff proposed joint action to the acting Russian commander-in-chief, General Mikhail Alekseyev: the Russians were to push the Turks back towards Mosul and reach the Tigris, while the British pinned the enemy down at Samarra. Alekseyev replied by asking whether Maude could supply the Russians with food, because without it their movements in Persia would soon come to a stop. According to Moberly, in mid-April Radatz’s staff admitted that there were only about 3,000 Russian soldiers at Qasr-e Shirin and west of it, and that there were no orders for further operations. By the end of the month the Russians had abandoned the idea of a march on Mosul and intended only to hold a line from Rawanduz through Sulaymaniyah to Qizil Ribat.

The town and its people

Maude wrote in his letters that a great opportunity had been lost: in his view the Turks, who were short of food and ammunition, were ready to fall back as far as Mosul if the Russians pressed them. The British official and historian Arnold Wilson judged the Russian presence even more harshly. He wrote that the Russian troops lived off the country, rarely paying for anything, and that the inhabitants of Khanaqin suffered terribly at their hands both in 1916 and in 1917. In May Radatz did force the Diyala in several places, but after a Turkish counter-attack and the onset of the summer heat Pavlov broke off the advance and pulled his troops back to Qasr-e Shirin. The joint Russo-British offensive that had been hoped for after the fall of Baghdad never came about.