The Caucasian Deputies' Visit to Istanbul and the Caucasusian Front (1918)

The war broke out in early November 1914 between the Ottoman and Russian empires in the Caucasus, and that in the following years the Russian army occupied almost the entire Eastern Anatolia. This state of affairs only changed with the beginning of the Russian Revolution in March 1917, which brought about an undeclared truce on the Caucasian front. After the Bolsheviks came to power In November 1917, the armistices of Brest-Litovsk and of Erzincan were signed, and consequently the Russian troops began to withdraw from the Caucasian front. The departing Russian Army left their weapons, ammunition and other military supplies with the Armenian and Georgian forces, enabling them to set up their own national armies to seize control of the areas vacated by the Russian Army, not only in Eastern Anatolia but also in the Caucasus as a whole. For the Muslim population of the region, which were under the pressure of the Georgian and Armenian military formations, the only military and political power in the region to seek support from was the Ottoman Empire. Therefore, deputies from the South Caucasus, which included Naki Keykurun Şeyhzamanli of Azerbaijan and Omer Faik Numanzâde of Meskhetia (Ahiska) region, visited Istanbul between February and March in 1918 to seek military and political aid from the Porte. As a result of this initiative, the Turkish forward operation in Caucasian battlefields, which had begun on 12 February 1918, was reconfigured to include all areas inhabited by local Muslims. Furthermore, the foundations of an Ottoman army corps called the 'Islamic Army of the Caucasus', were laid during this visit. Due to these developments, the Ottoman Army not only re-captured the territories under Russian occupation but also took control of such districts asElviye-i Selâse (The three sanjaks of Batum, Kars ve Ardahan) as well as Akhaltsikhe, Azerbaijan and Daghestan, which had been beyond Ottoman control before the war. In this article, the Transcaucasian deputies' visit to the Porte and its effects on the Caucasian battlefields will be examined with the help of the archival materials obtained from the Ottoman Archives of the Turkish Prime Ministry, Ottoman and foreign media, the memoirs of key personalities of the era, and other secondary sources.