With the Persian Expedition

by Martin Henry Donohoe

The last phase—Dunsterforce ceases to exist—The end of Turkish opposition—Off to Bijar—The Kurdish tribes—Raids on Bijar—Moved on by a policeman—Governor and poet.

It was in South-Western Kurdistan that I saw the last phase of the war between the Turks and ourselves.

At the end of September, Dunsterforce had ceased to exist, at any rate under that name. Dunsterville himself had gone down to Bagdad to discuss the whole Caucasian and North Persian situation with General Headquarters, and the officers of Dunsterforce had either gone back to their units in France, Salonika, and Egypt, or had been absorbed by the North Persian force which was concentrating under General Thompson at Enzeli for a fresh smack at the Turk in Baku.

After his capture of the oilfields' port, the enemy seemed to have reached the last stages of physical exhaustion, and to be incapable of further effort. His push through from Tabriz towards Zinjan and Kasvin had been finally arrested, and he had been driven back to his entrenchments on the Kuflan Kuh Pass, where he was well content to sit down to a peaceful, inoffensive life, smoke his hubble-bubble, nurse his blistered feet lacerated by long marches on unfriendly Persian roads, and, in general, by his exemplary behaviour earn "good conduct" marks from the inhabitants of the zone of occupation.

But in the country to the west of Mianeh and south of Lake Urumia the enemy was still inclined to spasmodic activity. It was in this region that he had harried the Nestorian Army as it was fighting its way to the south and to safety. At the beginning of October, 1918, the Turks held Sauj Bulagh, the local capital of the Kurds of Azerbaijan, Sakiz, Sain Kaleh, and Takan Teppeh, all of which were in more or less precarious touch with Kowanduz on the western slopes of the Kurdistan Range, and thence with the main and sole surviving Turkish Mesopotamian Army which was clinging tenaciously to Mosul. Their occupation of these several strategic points on the Persian side of the frontier enabled the Turks to threaten the British post at Bijar, on the confines of South-Western Kurdistan, and in a sense to menace the British occupation of Hamadan.

GENERAL VIEW OF THE SCENE FOLLOWING THE ARMENIAN RETIREMENT.

But Allenby's smashing blow at the Turk in Palestine had its repercussion in the remote highlands of Persia and in the remoter region of the Caspian Sea. Its effect was instantaneous. It broke the Turkish grip on Baku and appreciably loosened his hold on Azerbaijan. He withdrew from Mianeh and made ready to evacuate Tabriz and retire into his own territory in an eleventh-hour effort to buttress up his remaining Asiatic provinces which, one after the other, were tottering beneath the sledgehammer blows of the British.

Early in October the wheel of fate and the illness of a brother officer led to my being transferred from Caspian Headquarters to Bijar, as Assistant Political Officer and Intelligence Officer. I looked it up on the map and started. It was a long and interesting zigzag trek across Persia, first south-west to Hamadan, then north-west to Bijar and the wild country of the Kurdish tribes.