Page 61 - Arabian Studies (V)

The British Government and the Khurmah Dispute 51
aid Husayn in his struggle. Neither of these two meas.ures was
adopted. Shuckburgh pointed out that wartime experience with
selective blockade measures in the Gulf had shown that they were
difficult to enforce. And Curzon objected to the dispatch of tanks
to the Hijaz, because he believed that untrained Arab personnel
probably would not be able to operate them effectively. Curzon
also ‘had some fear in his own mind that they were intended for use
against the French in Syria, where their inefficiency would not
counteract the unfortunate political effect of any suggestion that
His Majesty’s Government were supporting our Arab against our
European allies’.
Curzon concluded that Britain was now ‘definitely committed to
backing King Hussein’. Therefore, Ibn Sa‘ud should be informed
that ‘unless he withdrew at once from the Khurma area ... he
would be regarded as having definitely committed an act hostile to
His Majesty’s Government; the remainder of his subsidy would be
stopped; and he would lose all the advantages of his previous
treaties with Britain’. Essentially Curzon reiterated the policy
which he had formulated at the March session of the conference.
Khurmah was allotted to Husayn without the benefit of a boundary
commission, and Ibn Sa‘ud was threatened with dire consequences
if he did not comply with this decision and withdraw from the
disputed territory. Although the current message to Ibn Sa‘ud was
harsher and more threatening in tone than the previous one,
Curzon resisted pressure to take sterner and more immediately
decisive action against the Najdi ruler.
Instead of abandoning Khurmah, Ibn Sa‘ud marched his troops
forward to the oasis of Turabah, about seventy-five miles south­
west of Khurmah, where ‘Abdullah’s army was camped. In a
strikingly successful attack on the night of 25-26 May 1919, Ibn
Sa‘ud’s forces armed only with rifles annihilated the Hijaz army
which was led by Turkish and British trained officers and which
possessed ten guns and twenty machine guns. Intelligence reports
by Captain Garland of the Arab Bureau calculated that the Hijaz
army lost all of its guns and machine guns, two-thirds of its
supplies, and nine-tenths of its mule-mounted infantry. Fifty-seven
Hijaz officers were killed, including eleven with the rank of major
or above. Seeking an explanation for the disaster, Garland noted
that ‘although they had had previous warning of the night attack,
the regular officers who got away did so in their night attire. It was
ever one of the Baghdadi officer’s maxims not to allow military
duties to interfere with his night’s rest, and during the war,
outposts, pickets, and the like were invariably dispensed with by
the Hedjaz armies.’ Garland also commented that ‘whereas the