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Tribal Rebellion, Marxist Revolution 115

moved to settle accounts with Talib, Ghalib and Sulaiman ibn Himyar. Start­
ing from his southern capital of Salalah in Dhufar, Said ibn Taimur made a
500-mile journey across the desert to Nizwa, which he entered unopposed in
the last week of December 1955. Meanwhile, on the seaward side of the Hajar
mountains, troops of the Muscat and Oman Field Force had flushed Talib ibn
Ali from Rastaq, though they failed to take him prisoner. Sulaiman ibn Himyar
came down to Nizwa from his eyrie in the Jabal Akhdar to tender his tainted
fealty, while the Imam Ghalib slipped away to his home village of Balad Sait,
where the sultan allowed him to remain on condition that he did not leave it.
Saiyid Said’s progress through the interior of Oman in the winter of 1955—6
seems to have exhausted his capacity for vigorous action. Thenceforward he
left the government of the country largely to his elderly wazir, Ahmad ibn
Ibrahim, while denying him the authority, financial resources or adminis­
trative freedom to govern effectively. Ahmad ibn Ibrahim coped as best he
could, with the help of a handful of British advisers and by recourse to the
traditional Al Bu Said methods of persuasion and coercion - money and other
gifts for the more influential shaikhs, meaningful references to the sultan’s
standing army for the ill-disposed or recalcitrant. Neither expedient was very
successful: Saudi Arabia could furnish more splendid bribes and the Muscat
and Oman Field Force, recruited mainly from the heterogeneous population of
the coast, ill-equipped and short of officers, was hardly of the calibre to
frighten the mountain badmashes.
Talib ibn Ali had meanwhile made his way to Saudi Arabia to seek solace and
plot revenge. Throughout 1956 and the early months of 1957 he occupied
himself with training and equipping an Oman Liberation Army at Dammam in
Hasa, and with smuggling arms and men into Oman in preparation for an
uprising. An ‘Imamate of Oman’ office was set up in Cairo to disseminate
propaganda and promote the concept of a sovereign and independent imamate
state, separate from the sultanate. The office was headed by members of the
family of Salih ibn Isa, the tamimah of the Hirth, and it was in the Sharqiyah,
the stronghold of the Hirth, that the first signs of rebellion made their appear­
ance in the spring of 1957. At a loss to know what to do, the sultan invited
Salih’s brother, Ibrahim ibn Isa, to Muscat. Surprisingly, Ibrahim came, early
in June. Less surprisingly, the sultan promptly clapped him into gaol. Another
guest of the sultan that month was Sulaiman ibn Himyar, whose disposition
and intentions the sultan was anxious to gauge. The Bani Riyam chief noted the
imprisonment of Ibrahim ibn Isa, and he also knew that Talib ibn Ali had
secretly returned to Oman in the middle of June, landing on the Batinah coast
with a consignment of arms. What tipped the scales for Sulaiman, however,
was the closing down that month of the Petroleum Development (Oman) base
at Daqm in southern Oman. Henceforth the main supply base was to be at
Azaiba on the Batinah coast, which meant that the company’s supply route to
the interior would have to go through the Wadi Samail. Sulaiman calculated