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SARIKAMISH
While the Sheikh-ul-Islam was calling on all Muslims to cast out foreign oppressors, Young Turks such as Enver Pasha and Talaat Bey wanted to draw the Turkic peoples of the East together into a new empire. Although willing to support Germany's jihad dreams wherever they coincided with Turkish interests, Enver and Talaat were secular modernisers with more practical and pragmatic concerns. In the 1870s, Russia had seized Turkish [territory in the Caucasus, and Enver Pasha wanted it back.
Enver's plan was for the Turkish 9th Corps to march over the Allah Akbar mountains and ambush the Russians at Sarikamish in the Caucasus. The plan nearly worked. The speed of the initial Turkish advance surprised the Russians and they started retreating, but then the weather changed and thousands of Turkish troops were left stranded in the high mountains without adequate clothing. Huge numbers were killed by hypothermia:
'The Germans complained about the slowness... but the snow was so deep. Soldiers got lost at night, some tried to light fires but many fell asleep, never to wake again... we realised in the morning that half of the division had frozen to death.'
Köprülülü Serif, a Turkish officer
About 25,000 Turkish soldiers died in the high mountains in January 1915. Sarikamish remained in Russian hands. Enver Pasha should have accepted full responsibility for the disaster he had engineered, but, instead, he looked around for a scapegoat and found one in the Christian Armenians.
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