Russians take Rowanduz

In mid-May 1916 Russian cavalry captured Rowanduz, a small Kurdish town in the mountains of northern Mesopotamia, on the road from Persia to Mosul. A British chronology of the war and W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, the authors of a history of the Caucasian wars, give the date as 15 May. General Yevgeny Maslovsky, a staff officer of the Caucasus Army, writes of 30 April by the Julian calendar, that is, 13 May by the Gregorian. General Percy Lake, commander of the British forces in Mesopotamia, learned of the town’s capture on 16 May.

The advance on Mosul

Rowanduz lay in a deep gorge carrying one of the few roads through the mountains from Persian Kurdistan to the plains around Mosul and Erbil. As early as the winter, Russian patrols sent out from Sauj Bulak (today Mahabad) had reported Turkish forces being strengthened between Mosul and Rowanduz. In the spring, when the British were pleading for help for besieged Kut and General Nikolai Baratov’s corps was advancing from Kermanshah towards Baghdad, General Fyodor Chernozubov’s Azerbaijan–Van detachment was ordered to strike towards Mosul.

According to Maslovsky, the advance went in two columns as soon as the snow began to melt on the passes. From near Urmia General Levandovsky’s detachment set out: a brigade of Transbaikal Cossacks, two battalions of plastuns, a militia company and scouts from the Assyrian (Nestorian) mountain tribes, commanded by Agha Petros. It reached the village of Neri in the Hakkari mountains. From near Sauj Bulak the second column set out, which Maslovsky calls the general’s detachment and Allen and Muratoff Colonel Rybalchenko’s: two regiments of Kuban Cossacks, a mounted frontier guard regiment, a mountain battery and Keri’s 4th Armenian Volunteer Detachment. This column fought its way into Rowanduz. Allen and Muratoff call the capture “brilliant”. In the fighting for the town, according to some sources on 15 May itself, the commander of the Armenian detachment was killed: Arshak Gavafian, known as Keri, a veteran of the Armenian partisan bands (fedayi).

Far from Baratov

According to Maslovsky, Rowanduz lay four to five days’ march from Mosul. It was, however, a long way from Baratov’s corps, which a few days earlier had taken Qasr-e Shirin. The British official history observes that a broad belt of very difficult mountainous country stretched between Rowanduz and Baratov. The two Russian groups could not support each other, and Kut had already been in Turkish hands for two weeks. The commander of the Caucasus Army, General Nikolai Yudenich, according to Allen and Muratoff, took no interest either in Rowanduz or in the Mosul direction.

The Turks took this conquest seriously. According to Maslovsky, the Ottoman Minister of War, Enver Pasha, who was in Baghdad in those days, ordered the Sixth Army to strike at Persia on a front from Mandali to Rowanduz, and Allen and Muratoff write that the 4th Cavalry Division was left at Mosul to cover the Rowanduz direction.

The town’s population

The war in these mountains was particularly cruel to the civilian population. In 1915 some Kurdish units had taken part in the Armenian genocide and in the massacres of Assyrians, and the Armenian and Assyrian volunteers fighting alongside the Russians later took revenge on the Muslim population. The historian Michael Reynolds cites the account of a British officer, Major Edward Noel, who wrote of the destruction of Rowanduz and the slaughter of its Muslim inhabitants by Agha Petros’s forces. From the available accounts it is impossible to establish exactly when and how these crimes took place or how many people were killed. Figures of the order of 5,000–8,000 dead that appear in later publications are not documented.

The Russians held Rowanduz for two and a half months. In June they beat off attacks by the Kurds and by units of the Turkish 4th Division. At the end of July, when Baratov was already falling back into Persia and the Turks approached with two regiments and twelve guns, Yudenich ordered the town to be evacuated.