Balance Sheet of the Events of April–May 1915
According to the general balance sheet drawn up by the Russian army after it took control of the vilayet of Van, the advancing Russian forces discovered 55,000 corpses in May 1915, which they burned as they went. This represents a little more than 50 per cent of the vilayet’s Armenian population.
In addition to the human losses, the vilayet’s Armenian villages had been systematically plundered and then burned down, leaving the refugee population, concentrated in Van, Shadakh and Moks, in a precarious state. Indeed, the region had, for all practical purposes, been depopulated, inasmuch as its Muslim inhabitants had fled in the wake of the retreating Turkish army.
The Turkish Retreat and the Russian Advance
Over the month of May, the military situation in the region evolved rapidly. After the defeat suffered by the Ottoman Fifth Expeditionary Corps, the troops led by Lieutenant-Colonel Halil (Kut) were forced to retreat to Tokaraga, south of Başkale, fighting General Nazarbekov’s Sixth Russian Division and the auxiliary forces of the first battalion of Armenian volunteers as they withdrew.
Expressly dispatched from Istanbul, Halil’s Expeditionary Corps was much better equipped than the other Turkish forces, yet it did not obtain the expected results. Quite the opposite: it sustained the second major Turkish defeat on the eastern front, denying the Young Turks their primary objective of encompassing the local forces of Iranian
Azerbaijan within their Pan-Turk strategy, to which they had given a Pan-Islamic patina.
When Rafaël de Nogales arrived in Tokaraga on 15 May, Halil, a fanatical and jealous individual, had just given orders that his headquarters be transferred further south to Sova (today Sinova), which was apparently easier to defend.
At this point, the Sixth Russian Division was in Başkale. Nogales, who was retreating with the vanguard of the Expeditionary Corps, notes that they set out in the direction of the Norduz Mountains on 26 May, bivouacking on the way in Kişham, a village inhabited by semi-nomads of the Jewish faith who spoke a mixture of Kurdish and Armenian.
It reached Şağmanis on 29 May. On that day, the Russian vanguard was still in contact with the Ottoman Expeditionary Corps in the gorges of Norduz, but Halil seems to have abandoned the idea of putting up a defense, opting instead for a rapid withdrawal westward toward Siirt. So as to retreat faster, the Expeditionary Corps lightened its load by jettisoning its war booty along the way.
Sebuh, who was in the Russian vanguard that had set off in pursuit of the Turkish forces, had the impression that he was at an “open-air market”: strewn along the edge of the road were costly Persian rugs, household goods, clothes, and so on.
After weighing the possibility of returning to Vostan, Halil decided, probably in view of the Russian drive toward the northern shore of Lake Van, to follow the eastern Tigris river valley south of Şatak. En route, the vali of Van and his troops, passing by way of Khoşab, linked up with the Expeditionary Corps. According to Sebuh, the Turkish troops systematically slaughtered the inhabitants of all the Armenian villages they found on their path.
After making a number of detours toward the southwest, the purpose of which was to take them ever further from the Russian forces, the Turkish troops crossed the Tigris on 7 June, arriving in Khisgir/Hisgir on 9 June, the same time as Colonel Isak and the “famed tribune” Ömer Naci, an eminent member of the Special Organization who was probably returning to Turkey from Persia in order to take part in operations planned for the vilayet of Bitlis.
As the Expeditionary Corps approached Siirt, in the kaza of Şirvan, it slew some 20 Armenian speaking Nestorians in Gundeş/Gunde Deghan. This violence was a harbinger of the crimes that would be committed throughout the vilayet of Bitlis in the following weeks.
To be continued
Note- this chapter is from Raymond Kévorkian’s book ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: A Complete History, pp. 333-334.
