Turks occupy Urmia

On 16 April 1915 regular Ottoman troops under Halil Bey reached Urmia in north-western Persia. The town did not change hands that day. Since the Russian withdrawal at the beginning of January it and the surrounding plain had been dominated by Kurdish bands, Turkish volunteers and small army detachments. Now, for the first time, a large regular army appeared in Persian Azerbaijan.

Halil’s expedition

Halil Bey, later known as Halil Pasha and Halil Kut, was the uncle of the war minister Enver Pasha. He commanded the so-called 1st Expeditionary Corps, which was sent from Constantinople via Aleppo to Mosul, and from there across the mountain passes of Kurdistan into Persia. According to the account of the American missionaries in Urmia, published in 1916 in the British “Blue Book” on the treatment of the Armenians, Halil’s forces numbered about 18,000 men with mountain guns. Military studies give more modest figures: about 11,000 regular soldiers, supported by Kurdish horsemen.

The expedition was meant to turn the tide of the war on the frontier. During the winter the Turks and Kurds had twice tried to drive the Russians out of Persian Azerbaijan. In January they took Tabriz, but lost it after three weeks. Until 1 March, supported by troops from Van under the governor of that province, Cevdet Bey, Enver’s brother-in-law, they attacked Khoy without success. In March the Russians drove them from the Salmas plain, north of Lake Urmia. Before withdrawing, Cevdet’s men massacred several hundred Christians there who had not managed to flee. Halil was to clear this area of Russian troops and threaten the Russian front in the Caucasus from the south.

A town of Christians and refugees

Urmia, which Halil’s soldiers entered, had been living under occupation for three and a half months. The Christian inhabitants of the plain, Assyrians and Armenians, who had not managed to flee with the Russians, crowded into the buildings of the American and French missions. Kurds and local Muslims plundered and burnt Christian villages. In the second half of February several dozen men were killed in Gulpashan, the largest Assyrian village of the plain, and according to the missionaries in the same weeks several dozen people hiding in the French mission were taken out and shot. Typhus and typhoid fever spread in the overcrowded shelters. The missionaries fell ill too, and the wife of one of them, Mrs McDowell, died on 16 April itself.

For the Christians the arrival of regular troops brought no improvement. According to the missionaries’ accounts, Armenian soldiers serving in the Ottoman army were shot even before Halil arrived, and after his defeat Armenians and Assyrians in his own units were also killed. Historians count the events in Urmia and on the Salmas plain as part of the Assyrian genocide, which took place in parallel with the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire.

Defeat at Dilman

Halil did not stay long in Urmia. He moved north, onto the Salmas plain, where at Dilman (today Salmas) his way was barred by a Russian detachment under General Tovmas Nazarbekian, supported by a battalion of Armenian volunteers. The battle, fought at the turn of April and May, ended in defeat for the Turks, who lost several thousand men. The dates of this battle are given differently, partly because Russian sources reckoned time by the Julian calendar, then 13 days behind.

The beaten Halil withdrew in May towards Van. The last Ottoman troops left Urmia on 20 May, and on 24 May the Russians entered the town. According to the missionaries, during the occupation of almost five months more than a thousand Christians were murdered in Urmia and its surroundings, and at least four thousand died of disease.