The Russo-Turkish frontier from Cram's 1896 Railway Map of the Turkish Empire. The Black Sea is in the northwest, Persia to the southeast. The area had a large Armenian and Christian population, and was a principal site of the Armenian Genocide and of Russian military successes.
"On January 14 [1916] an unexpected Russian offensive began against the center of the [Turkish] Third Army. The attack began on the dominating heights of the Aras River, followed by further attacks in the sections adjoining on the south. For some reason the commander, Mahmud Kiamil Pasha, happened to be in Constantinople just then and the German chief of staff was absent in Germany to recover from a case of typhus. Abdul Kerim Pasha let the army.The Russians broke the center of the Third Army."
Excerpt from the summary of events in 1916 on the Russo-Turkish front in the Caucasus Mountains by German General Liman von Sanders. With the failure of the Allied Gallipoli Campaign, Turkey was in a position to redeploy its troops to other fronts. Russia struck before the redeployment could complete. Sanders was chief of the German military mission to Turkey, and had commanded Turkish forces on the Gallipoli Peninsula prior to the Allied evacuation in January.
Five Years in Turkey by Liman von Sanders, page 124, publisher: The Battery Press with War and Peace Books, publication date: 1928 (originally)
1916-01-14, 1916, January, Caucasus, Caucasus Mountains
