Map of Syria, Palestine, Turkey, and Mesopotamia from the Baedeker 1912 travel guide Palestine and Syria with Routes through Mesopotamia and Babylonia and with the Island of Cyprus.
"On October 2, 1918, Enver ordered the evacuation of the Transcaucasus, freeing up (in theory) four divisions to defend the capital. The Ninth Division of the Ottoman Sixth Army, still spread along the Persian front, was ordered back to Mosul, to defend against the British Indian Army advancing north from Baghdad.It was far too little, and at least a year too late. So spent had Turkey's fighting power been by the end of 1917, so overstretched her limited supplies of war matériel and lines of communication, that Liman had advised Enver, on the eve of Brest-Litovsk, that she could muster only enough strength 'for a vigorous campaign on one front.' Instead the Ottoman generalissimo had wagered the Ottoman Empire on a mad gamble to expand to the Caspian."
With the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and its removal of Russia from the war in early 1918, Turkish War Minister Ismail Enver diverted his limited resources to an expansion of the Ottoman Empire beyond the Caucasus Mountains into Russia and Persia. At the beginning of October, 1918, his troops were being driven back in Syria and Mesopotamia. Otto Liman von Sanders was a German general who had gone to Turkey in December, 1913 as head of a German Military Mission.
The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908–1923 by Sean McMeekin, page 400, copyright © 2015 by Sean McMeekin, publisher: Penguin Books, publication date: 2015
1918-10-02, October, 1918, Lake Van
