Devoid of an effective force to defend them, the Iranian people witnessed repeated offensives from the Russians and Ottomans along the Eastern Front, where they marched in and out of the provinces of Azarbaijan, Kermanshah, and Hamadan. Between the winter of 1914 and the spring of 1917, parts of these provinces changed hands at least eight times between the Russian and Turkish forces, at an enormous humanitarian and economic cost to the civilian population.
Both the Ottoman Turks and the tsarist Russians committed repeated atrocities toward urban and rural inhabitants; houses were looted, women raped, children abducted, fields burned, and their provisions confiscated. The Young Turk operations in neighboring Ottoman Anatolia forced the dislocation of a million and a half of Armenians from their ancestral homeland on a massive, genocidal scale. Tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the Ottoman army and the collaborating Kurdish irregulars, crossed the border to nearby Iranian towns and villages.
Tabriz and Hamadan, in particular, bore the brunt of the occupations, which caused, among other things, a typhus epidemic and widespread starvation. British advances on the Mesopotamian front between 1915 and 1917 cut off the western supply route that connected the Persian Gulf to the markets of central Iran through Basra, Baghdad, Kermanshah, and Hamadan. This further aggravated the depressed state of the Iranian economy and wreaked havoc on the price of commodities.
Tehran could view this state of affairs only with a mix of horror and resignation as the warring armies moved closer to the capital. In December 1914, after a hiatus of two years, the third Majles was convened. Even though the provinces were not fully represented, the very survival of the parliamentary order provided only fleeting solace to Iran’s embattled nationalists. New faces represented the Democrats and Moderates. Most visible among the Moderates was Hasan Modarres (c. 1870–1937), a man of austere lifestyle and forthright demeanor. He was a middle-ranking cleric from Isfahan with oratorical talent and parliamentary skills. Solayman Mirza, the Qajar nobleman who led the Democrats, would be among a handful of socialists to survive exile and assassination in the coming years.
In the absence of Taqizadeh, who had fled first to Istanbul, and then Berlin, he would play a significant role in the postwar era. Yet regardless of political orientation, both factions in the Majles soon found themselves facing domestic and international crises beyond the capacity of the feeble parliament and constant government turnover. Between 1914 and 1918, there were no fewer than twelve changes of government, nearly all headed by elite statesmen and manned by a combination of the Qajar nobility and figures who had risen to prominence during the constitutional era. Brazen intervention by the representatives of the two neighboring powers left a limited role for the Majles over the rise and fall of these cabinets.
Discovery of Oil in Khuzestan
