Page 120 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Tribal Rebellion, Marxist Revolution 117

prevent them from mining the roads, while they themselves pushed ahead with
the job of getting the askaris of the Sultan’s Armed Forces (as the Muscat and
Oman Field Force had now been renamed) into shape to assault the Jabal
Akhdar. All through 1958 the insurgents were kept supplied with weapons and
other requirements by Saudi Arabia, the arms being smuggled into the high
Oman by various routes - overland by way of the Buraimi oasis, through the
port of Dubai on the Trucial Coast and by clandestine landings on the Batinah
coast. Most of the weapons originated in the United States and had been
shipped to Saudi Arabia under military aid agreements. British representations
in Washington for restrictions to be placed on the use of these weapons,
especially the mines (which were killing British soldiers as well as Omanis),
met with the reply that it was no concern of the United States government how
the Saudis chose to dispose of their weapons. No other answer could have been
expected, for, as was later to emerge, the rebels were at this time in regular
wireless communication with both the Saudis and the Central Intelligence
Agency.
By the late summer of 1958 Smiley had been forced to the conclusion that the
assault on the Jabal Akhdar could not be carried out by the Sultan’s Armed
Forces alone. He asked, therefore, for British troops and got them, despite the
apprehensions of the Foreign Office over the impression that might be created
in the Middle East and elsewhere. Two squadrons of the 22nd Special Air
Services Regiment and a squadron of the Life Guards arrived in Oman in the
next few months, and in the last week of January 1959, supported by a
squadron of the Trucial Oman Scouts and the Northern Frontier Regiment of
the S AF, they scaled the forbidding heights of the Jabal Akhdar and overcame
the rebels in a brief but hard-fought action. The wily trinity of Ghalib, Talib
and Sulaiman ibn Himyar, however, again escaped capture, made their way
through the Sharqiyah to the east coast and slipped away by dhow to Saudi
Arabia. Although they continued for the next two or three years to smuggle
arms and supplies to their supporters scattered through central Oman, the
heart had really gone out of the insurgency with the storming of the Jabal
Akhdar. The subsequent programme of development carried out under Hugh
Boustead’s direction in the valleys and plateaux of the jabal gradually banished
whatever traces of nostalgia may have lingered among the tribesmen for the
good old days of carefree brigandage.
With the rebels for all practical purposes vanquished, and the normal
pattern of tribal alliances disrupted by the events of the years 1954-9, Said ibn
Taimur was in a position to tighten his administrative hold on the interior of
Oman. Where tribal power still predominated, e.g. in the Sharqiyah, Jaalan
and the Duru country, he made no move to interfere with the tamimahs in the
exercise of their tribal authority or the enjoyment of their quasi-independent
status. Elsewhere, the overthrow or flight of local magnates allowed him to
appoint walis, directly responsible to him, to govern the tribes in his name.