Play as · WW1 1914 · L2 · Contested Neutral
Iran - August 1, 1914
The Iran of 1914 - Qajar Persia - is formally an independent kingdom and practically a battleground for other people's empires. Seven years earlier, in the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, Britain and Russia divided the country between them without asking: a Russian sphere of influence across the north, a British sphere in the southeast guarding the approaches to India, and a nominally neutral zone in between. The Qajar monarchy in Tehran is weak, its treasury empty, its authority barely reaching beyond the capital and the main towns; real power in much of the country belongs to tribal confederations and foreign-officered forces. When the World War breaks out, Persia declares neutrality - and every belligerent proceeds to ignore it, marching Russian, British and later Ottoman troops across its territory as if the declaration had never been made. The strategic identity is the neutral that no one respects: a state too weak to defend its own borders or enforce its own choices, whose land, and increasingly whose newly-discovered oil, are simply too valuable for stronger powers to leave alone.
Starting position
Persia enters the war with almost none of the instruments a state needs to protect itself. It has no effective national army: the most capable armed force in the country is the Persian Cossack Brigade, officered by Russians and loyal in practice to St Petersburg, while the newer Gendarmerie, trained by Swedish officers, leans toward the Central Powers as a way of resisting the Anglo-Russian grip. Central finances are mortgaged and chaotic, communications are primitive, and the writ of Tehran competes everywhere with tribal power. Against this weakness sit assets that are entirely double-edged. The country's position - astride the land routes between the Russian Caucasus, Ottoman Mesopotamia and British India - makes it strategically valuable and therefore a target. And at Abadan in the southwest, the Anglo-Persian oil concession has just made Persian oil vital to a Royal Navy converting from coal, which guarantees that Britain will fight to hold the fields and the Ottomans and their allies will try to reach them. Everything that makes Persia matter also makes it a place others will fight over, on its soil, without its leave.
What turns the campaign
What Persia wants, above all, is to become real as a sovereign state: to void the 1907 spheres, to clear foreign armies from its territory, to bring the Cossack Brigade and the provinces under genuine national control, and to play the great powers against one another rather than be divided by them. Among Persian nationalists and in the German-leaning Gendarmerie there is a real hope that siding with the Central Powers, or at least resisting the Anglo-Russian condominium, might break the grip that has reduced the country to a protectorate in all but name; German agents work hard to encourage exactly that. What Persia fears is the completion of what 1907 began - outright partition between Britain and Russia - together with Ottoman invasion of the northwest around Azerbaijan, the loss of the oilfields to the fighting, famine and disorder as foreign armies live off the land, and the final collapse of a central government that can barely function in peacetime. Persia's war is not a contest for advantage but a struggle to survive as a country while three empires fight across it.
Signature challenge
The neutral no one respects
Iran's central strategic problem is that it has the sovereignty of a state and the strength of a bystander, and the gap between the two is where its war is fought - by others, on its territory. It declares neutrality and is ignored; it claims its borders and cannot hold them; it owns oil the world's leading navy now depends on and cannot keep the war away from the wells. Russian, British and Ottoman forces move across Persian soil at will, and the government in Tehran can neither stop them nor turn their rivalry to consistent advantage. That is why NationFall rates Persia far below a true great power despite its size and position: its central challenge is not to win a war but to remain a state at all while stronger powers wage theirs across it. The campaign's defining tension is exactly that - can a hollow monarchy exploit the very rivalry that divides it, playing Berlin against London and Petrograd, to emerge from the war more sovereign rather than partitioned out of existence? Survive the occupations, hold the idea of a Persian state together, and turn everyone's disrespect into the leverage of a country too useful to erase.
Try the Iran campaign
Free demo. Pick WW1. Pick Iran. Survive three empires on your soil and come out a state, not a sphere.
Play Free Demo as IranRegional: the Ottoman Empire · the Russian Empire · the United Kingdom - see the WW1 1914 scenario hub
Iran across the eras