Truce of Tukayyid
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The Truce of Tukayyid, also known as the Treaty of Tukayyid,[1] was a 15-year (3052 to 3067) truce during which the Clans would halt their invasion of the Inner Sphere. It was the agreed-upon outcome of the May 3052 Battle of Tukayyid, a proxy battle which was essentially a Clan-style Trial fought between ComStar's military arm, the Com Guards, on behalf of the Inner Sphere and the invading Clans.
The Battle of Tukayyid[edit]
While ComStar initially attempted to neutrally serve the Clans as they did the Inner Sphere powers, upon learning that the Clans' ultimate goal was to capture Terra, Precentor Martial Anastasius Focht met with ilKhan Ulric Kerensky to organize a proxy battle on the Free Rasalhague Republic agricultural world of Tukayyid for control of the cradle of humanity. If the Com Guards lost, ComStar would join the invaders and Terra would be theirs. However, if ComStar won, the Clans would not advance any further towards Terra than Tukayyid for fifteen years.
The actual battle was broken down into Com Guard–defended objectives that the Clans would try to conquer. Save for Clan Wolf, the majority of the Clans once again anticipated an easy battle and swift victory. However, Focht had not been idle during his time with them and had correctly predicted that the Clan style of fighting favored short battles with little concern towards any ability to withstand a long term engagement. Planning his defense carefully, Focht stockpiled enough stores to supply his troops for more than a month and ordered his forces to harass the Clans, rather than commit to a direct confrontation. Despite their relative inexperience and heavy losses, the Com Guards slowly wore the Clans down, and after 21 days of bitter fighting had won the battle.
The Truce Line[edit]
The Clans had agreed not to carry out attacks on the Inner Sphere rimward of the Tukayyid system, i.e. cross the plane emanating from Tukayyid and extending to the edges of the Inner Sphere perpendicular to the Clan Occupation Zones. In terms of the two-dimensional jump map centered on Terra, this truce line runs parallel to the X axis (spinward/anti-spinward) through the Tukayyid system at approximately 210.42 light years on the Y axis (coreward/rimward). The Clans were precluded from attacking any target that is situated on a Y axis map position of less than 210.42 lightyears, "south" (rimward) from or "below" Tukayyid on the map.
The truce notably did not preclude the Clans from attacking systems above the truce line. This included large parts of the Lyran portion of the Federated Commonwealth and of the Draconis Combine.
Following the Battle of Tukayyid and with their militaries exhausted, both the Clans and the Inner Sphere sought to hone their warriors and keep their foes off balance in various objective raids instead of planetary conquest, actions reminiscent of the final years of the Third Succession War. Clan Jade Falcon raided the Federated Commonwealth world of Blue Hole as early as April 3053. The first documented raid by Inner Sphere forces was a raid against La Grave by Federated Commonwealth forces, planned in 3053 and carried out in February of 3054. In the same month, Clan Jade Falcon attacked Morges and Clan Steel Viper attacked Crimond; both of these attacks were repulsed.[2]
(There had been a covert infiltration by Capellan Confederation operatives against Clan Steel Viper on Benfled in March of 3053 already[3] that culminated in a brief 'Mech fight, but this incident was apparently not considered a raid.)
Aftermath[edit]
For the Clans the unexpected loss had devastating effects. Not only were their frontline forces mauled and weakened; the truce led to a massive escalation of the internal conflict between the Warden and Crusader factions. Unlike the Inner Sphere, the Clans cycled their warriors through at a very high rate and by the time the truce ended in 3067 the warriors who had served in the Clans' frontline Galaxies at the time of the invasion would be long retired. Having fought in the initial invasion these warriors had gotten a taste for true all-out war and became increasingly dissatisfied with the state of peace they now found themselves in and the prospect of being disgraced older warriors who wouldn't see action outside of solahma units by then. Rogue Crusader elements even staged the Red Corsair Affair in 3055 to circumvent the truce.
At the other end of the cycle, three generations of Clan warriors would enter service and know nothing of warfare except trials, exercises and the occasional raid. These relatively untested warriors would then be facing Inner Sphere troops, many of whom would have seen action during the invasion, piloting upgraded 'Mechs almost equal to Clan designs.
The dissatisfaction against the Truce focused on ilKhan Ulric Kerensky, despite the fact the Grand Council all voted in favor of its terms, ultimately leading to a charge against him of treason and genetic genocide against the Clan way of life which culminated in the Refusal War in 3057. As the Warden Clans had hoped, the truce led to a fragmentation of the Clans' purpose and prevented their Crusader brethren from denying the Inner Sphere the respite the truce represented.
While the result was unthinkable for the Clans, the truce was not a perfect solution for the Inner Sphere powers either. The truce merely prevented the Clans from approaching any closer to Terra than Tukayyid, leaving numerous worlds above the truce line, including the Draconis Combine's capital of Luthien, open to attack. While the truce bought the Inner Sphere powers time to rebuild and upgrade their shattered forces, the ending of the immediate conflict shattered the unification that the invasion had triggered and old conflicts returned to the fore. Even the Com Guards and Focht, at first lauded as heroes, were tainted by the actions of Operation SCORPION.
It took the Invasion of Coventry by Clan Jade Falcon in 3058 to finally force the Great Houses to start working together toward a more permanent solution: the re-formation of the Star League for the express purpose of ending the Clan threat, once and for all. To prove themselves a force to be reckoned with the new Star League chose to destroy Clan Smoke Jaguar. Initially, the Star League intended only to drive the Jaguars out of their occupation zone but information from a Smoke Jaguar traitor enabled them to strike at Jaguar's homeworld of Huntress as well.
After utterly destroying the Smoke Jaguars in 3060, the re-formed SLDF force led by Victor Steiner-Davion traveled to the Clan capital Strana Mechty and defeated the Crusader Clans in a Trial of Refusal, formally ending the Clan Invasion with seven years to spare.
The role of Ulric Kerensky[edit]
It is worth noting that the Truce of Tukayyid was a major political ploy by Ulric Kerensky. While the other invading Clans - and a share of his own Clan Wolf as well - were in the Crusader political camp, Ulric was a staunch Warden. He sought to minimize the damage and soften the impact the Crusader Clans could have on the Inner Sphere. After the death of Leo Showers in 3050 he was elected ilKhan because the Crusaders thought placing him in the lead role of the invasion would force him to fall in line. But instead he used his position to set the invaders up to fail. This included activating two reserve Clans for the invasion and pairing them with rival invader Clans (Clan Steel Viper with Clan Jade Falcon and Clan Nova Cat with Clan Smoke Jaguar) to sow tensions, and lifting the ban on inter-Clan trials among the invaders to set them against each other.
The Battle of Tukayyid was a golden opportunity for him no matter the outcome. Should the Clans win, it would only strengthen his grip on power as the victorious ilKhan and give him political leverage to reign in the Crusaders; if they lost, then the truce would grant the Inner Sphere a respite to narrow the technological gap and prepare for the next invasion while the Clans were hampered by internal strife. In both cases, the Clans' military might would be dramatically weakened from the fighting on Tukayyid as an added bonus. Ulric knew that the Clan industrial base was no match for the Inner Sphere who could recover from such losses much more easily.
Although he managed to defuse what amounted to a revolt against him by the Crusader movement in the Red Corsair Affair three years into the truce, Ulric found himself politically weakened enough to be deposed. But he managed to turn even this into a victory by declaring a Trial of Refusal against the decision on a scale never seen before - he set his entire Clan Wolf against the entire Clan Jade Falcon, the preeminent Crusader Clan. This led to the so-called Refusal War where he set Clan Jade Falcon and the Crusader portion of Clan Wolf up to wipe each other out, while preserving the Wolves' Warden faction and reforming them into Clan Wolf-in-Exile under Khan Phelan Wolf. Clan Jade Falcon eked out a narrow victory and both Ulric and Natasha Kerensky perished in the Refusal War, but Clan Jade Falcon also lost both Khans and had its military might crippled. In this way, Ulric had ensured that, even if they were unwilling to uphold the truce, the Clans were simply in no position to resume their invasion before the truce ran out.