DIFFERENCES BETWEEN PERSIA AND TURKEY. 337 same time the Meer of Kavandooz had attacked and plundered the district of Mergaver in the mountains of Uroomeeah. During the absence of the Shah at Herat, the thriving commercial town of Mohamera, situated near Bussora in the district of Chab in Khuzistan, had been attacked by the Turkish troops and completely destroyed. It is asserted that this aggression took place at the instigation of the Pasha of Baghdad, who was anxious to get rid of a commercial rival to Bussora, it having been discovered that the trade of the latter port was rapidly passing over to Mohamera. Persia had also to complain that some of her Kurdish tribes had been unfairly abstracted from her territory by the Pasha of Byazeed. She also claimed pecuniary compensation for the permission she had some years since granted to the Turkish tribes of Suleimanieh to pasture their flocks on Persian soil during the months of summer. Turkey, on the other hand, complained of the retention by Persia of the district of the bridge of Zohab on the frontier of the province of Kermanshah. To determine the frontier line between the two countries, a mixed commission was appointed, and the commissioners were to be guided in the adjustment of their differences by the opinion of a Kussian officer who was to accompany them over the line of frontier. To this commission a British member was afterwards added ; but so complicated were the questions to be solved, or so great the labour of surveying and mapping, that more than twenty years have been insufficient to bring the work to an end. The repre- sentatives of England and of Kussia at the Sublime Porte and at Tehran used all their influence to prevent a war at this time between the two great Moslem powers ; 22
