Persian Campaign - Background

Background

Persia was formally neutral in World War I. In reality, Persian forces were affected by the rivalry between the Allied Powers and the Central Powers and took sides based on the conditions. Western interest in Persia was based on its significant oil reserve and its strategic situation between Afghanistan and the warring Ottoman, Russian, and British Empires. Persia was divided into northern and southern spheres of influence under the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. The convention capped off several decades of the Great Game between the Russians and British. The treaty also defined their respective spheres of influence in Persia, Afghanistan, and Tibet and provided a counterweight to German influence.

Germany established their Intelligence Bureau for the East on the eve of World War I, dedicated to promoting and sustaining subversive and nationalist agitations in British India and the Persian and Egyptian satellite states. The bureau was involved in intelligence and subversive missions to Persia and Afghanistan to dismantle the Anglo-Russian Entente. The bureau's operations in Persia were led by Wilhelm Wassmuss. The Germans hoped to free Persia from British and Russian influence and to further create a wedge between Russia and the British, eventually leading to an invasion of British India by locally organized armies.

The Ottoman Empire's — or rather German — military strategic goal was to cut off Russian access to the hydrocarbon resources around the Caspian Sea. Aligned with the Germans, the Ottoman Empire wanted to wane the influence of the Entente in this region, but for a very different reason. The Ottoman Minister of War, Enver Pasha, claimed that if the Russians could be beaten in the key cities of Persia, it could open the way to Azerbaijan, to Central Asia and to India. Enver Pasha visioned an extended cooperation between these newly establishing nationalistic states, if they were to be removed from western influence. This was his pan-Turanian project. Enver's project conflicted a major western project played out as struggles among several key imperial powers, known as Imperialism in Asia. His political position was based on the assumption that none of the colonial powers possessed the resources to withstand the strains of world war and maintain their direct rule in their Asian colonies. Although nationalist movements throughout the colonial world led to political upheaval in nearly all colonies in Asia during World War I and the interwar period, the decolonisation on the scale of Enver's ambitions was never achieved. However, Enver Pasha continued with his ambition after the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire by the victorious Entente Powers until his death on August 4, 1922.

In 1914, before the war, the British government had contracted with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company for the supply of oil for the navy. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company was in the proposed path of Enver's project which British had the exclusive rights to work petroleum deposits throughout the Persian Empire except in the provinces of Azerbaijan, Gilan, Mazendaran, Astarabad and Khorasan.