the Caspian Sea from Baku. This action would open Central Asia to the Turks and give them access to British-controlled India through Afghanistan. The British landed in Baku on 17 August 1918. The British force was at this time 1,200 men strong. Dunsterforce was initially delayed by 3,000 Russian Bolshevik troops at Enzeli but then proceeded by ship to Baku on the Caspian Sea. This was the primary target for the advancing Ottoman forces and Dunsterforce endured a short, brutal siege in September 1918. The British held out for the first two weeks of September, inflicting heavy casualties on the enemy. A final Turkish attack on 14 September lasted until sunset, and, facing an overwhelmingly larger force, the British were forced to withdraw. The troops escaped from the port on three waiting ships on the same day. In total, the battle for Baku had resulted in around 200 British casualties, including 95 dead. However, having been defeated in World War I, the Ottoman Empire had to withdraw its forces from the borders of Azerbaijan in the middle of November 1918. Headed by General William Thomson, a British force of 1,600 troops arrived in Baku on 17 November, and martial law was implemented on the capital of Azerbaijan Democratic Republic until "the civil power would be strong enough to release the forces from the responsibility to maintain the public order". There were also British occupations of the Georgian cities of Tiflis and Batum in Georgia, along with the full length of the Baku-Batum railway, since the British wanted to protect this strategic line which connected the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. By January 1919, the British presence was 40,000 strong, the largest of all British intervention contingents in Russia. Again, these British occupations of territory in the Caucasus were in part motivated by a desire to 'protect India's flank' and secure the local oilfields, but they were also motivated by a desire to support the three new independent states and supervise the German and Ottoman withdrawal. The British forces served only a defensive purpose and were withdrawn in the summer of 1919, as regular troops were needed elsewhere and others were long overdue for demobilisation after the Armistice that ended the First World War. The last British forces left Baku on 24 August. Trans-Caspian Campaign With the British fearing that German and Ottoman forces may penetrate into Russian central Asia,