Heat

by Ranulph Fiennes

  The hardcore rebel leaders escaped to Saudi Arabia, but from then on permanent Sultanate garrisons were established on the Jebel. For the rest of the year, although the SAS were withdrawn, some British and Trucial Oman Scout units remained to mop up rebel guerrilla bands and block ongoing weapons and mines reaching them from Saudi Arabia.

  By the time, nine years later, that I arrived in Bahrain, all British forces had withdrawn, leaving only the agreement that a limited number of serving army and air force officers could volunteer to join the Sultan’s Army. When in the early 1960s Saudi troublemaking against the Sultanate switched to Dhofar, virtually all rebel activity up north had ceased.

  While delayed in Bahrain, I met an old friend, Nick Holder, who had been at Mons Cadet School with me before he joined the Parachute Regiment. After his three years with them he had left the army and joined Gillette. In Bahrain, he told me, selling razor blades was proving extremely tough because nearly all the males wore long beards and bushy moustaches. But he was happy, for he loved a challenge and didn’t seem to mind the oppressive climate.

  Like everyone else in Britain at the time, Nick was unaware of the nature of British involvement in Oman because a D-Notice was firmly in place which effectively prevented the media from reporting from the war zone. I had myself signed a form agreeing not to disclose details of military activities that I observed or was involved in. As far as I know this was the last conflict in which British forces were to be involved where D-Notices were tolerated by the public. It was some nine years between the mid 1960s and 1970s that British seconded officers fought and died for the Sultan in bitter but unsung fighting in Dhofar, about which the taxpayer, who paid their salaries, knew little or nothing.

  Looking back, this was strange, although I never questioned the policy at the time, since on the outcome of the fight between our Marxist-supported enemy and our Sultanate forces would hang the energy lifeblood of the West, enmeshed as it then was in a critical energy crisis.

  More than two-thirds of the crude oil needs of the free world during those dangerous Cold War years derived from the countries of the Persian Gulf. All of the giant tankers heading south from the shallow waters of the Gulf had to pass through the narrow bottleneck of the Straits of Hormuz, at an average rate of one every ten minutes every day of the year.

  These stormbound straits are twenty-five miles wide, only nine miles of which are navigable by tankers. They are guarded to the east by the Iranian navy. To the west the coast is commanded by the United Arab Emirates and the Sultanate of Oman, and it was here that the USSR was conducting a carefully planned war on two fronts. From within the UAE and the Sultanate creeping subversion spread insidiously side by side with persistent terrorist plots, and from without the attack was overt, for Oman’s southern province of Dhofar, a mountain-girt wonderland no bigger than Wales, abuts onto Aden.

  * Locations are approximate

  In June 1967, under Harold Wilson’s expedient guidance, the British imperialists withdrew from Aden, and within three months the Russian and Chinese imperialists moved into the resulting power vacuum; Marxism had now achieved a firm basis in the Arabian Peninsula from which to spread its wings. The land so long called Aden now became the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, or South Yemen for short, an official Marxist state that soon attracted revolutionaries from the far corners of Arabia, ablaze with desire to spread abroad the blessings of revolution. Dhofar was naturally their nearest target and only Dhofar and Oman blocked the way to the narrow Straits of Hormuz and the oil of the Persian Gulf.

  Dhofar was ruled by the ageing Sultan of Oman whose reactionary rule and longstanding friendship with Britain were tailor-made for propaganda purposes. The people were oppressed and poverty-stricken, the army was poorly armed and consisted of under a thousand fighting men, half of whom were Baluchi mercenaries with a handful of British volunteers in command. Since the Sultan had no friends but the British, the Marxists feared no outside intervention and rightly gauged that the British, still smarting from memories of Suez, would not wish any significant involvement in Dhofar. If pushed, they would withdraw smartly, abandoning the Sultan rather than risk a furore in the British Parliament and press.

  Readily available to help the Marxists with their initial moves was Musallim bin Nuffl, leader of the local rebels inside Dhofar, who had become fed up with the Sultan’s repressive measures as far back as 1964. When foreign oil prospectors had arrived in Dhofar, bin Nuffl had been lucky enough to obtain one of the few new jobs available, as a lorry mechanic. He soon learnt of the prosperity in other oil-rich Arab lands and noted that the Sultan used Indian and African labourers, not Dhofaris, to help the American oilmen in Dhofar. No bicycles, no transistor radios, and not even dark glasses might be bought by Dhofari townspeople, none of whom were allowed to hold any position of influence. Frustrated and enraged, bin Nuffl stirred up others of his tribe and after killing a few oil workers and destroying some lorries, he had taken his fledgling force off to Saudi Arabia and Iraq to train, calling them the Dhofar Liberation Front.

  Once trained, they returned to harass the Sultan’s forces in the mountains and to stir up trouble among the tribes. Bin Nuffl and his faction were not initially Marxists but non-revolutionary Muslims who wanted Dhofar for the Dhofaris. Nothing more. They were simple-minded nationalists who would ultimately have to be purged from the rebel leadership once Russian- and Chinese-trained Dhofaris were ready to take the helm.

  The Sultan himself had long since left his traditional palace in Oman’s capital city of Muscat, where his ancestors had faced civil war and inter-family or fraternal rivalry, and had settled in Salalah, the capital of Dhofar, leaving the troublesome north to be governed by a handful of trusted and well-paid Britons who were mostly ex-colonial administrators from the Indian Empire where he, the Sultan, had spent his youth. He had taken over the Sultanate on his father Taimur’s abdication in 1932.

  The ever-increasing dangers posed by the Marxist threat seemed to pass unnoticed by the Sultan in his coastal palace alongside an idyllic stretch of the white sands and palm trees of the Indian Ocean.

  Under pressure from his ageing British retainers he did stir himself sufficiently to slightly increase the strength of his army, but found it difficult to recruit local, loyal and professional officers. He relied largely on professional mercenaries recruited from Pakistan, India, Britain and South Africa, but the ones he could afford were scarce on the ground so he had pushed the Harold Wilson regime to honour a long-standing Anglo-Omani Agreement to allow any British officer who volunteered for a two-year posting to his Sultan’s Armed Forces (SAF) to do so without hindrance.

  In return for this officer loan system, the Sultan agreed to allow two key RAF stations to be based in Oman, one close to his Salalah Palace and the other on Masirah Island just off the Dhofar coast.

  When Richard John first told me of the chance to escape from the routine of boring tank exercises in Germany, he had described desert patrols in unexplored dune country and the search for terrorist arms caches buried in the sand. When he had additionally mentioned the presence of mountain lions, snakes, wolves and hyenas, I was truly hooked but blissfully unaware of the growing list of dead and wounded British officers, due to the D-Notice rulings.

  This was corrected when I met a friendly officer, Peter Southward-Heyton of the Muscat Regiment, who had had plenty of experience of the Dhofar war zone. I will précis some of the information that he passed to me over several glasses of ‘dark rum and coke’.

  On leaving their bases in the East Aden Protectorate the previous year, the British forces handed over large quantities of weapons and ammunition to their successors, the Federal Regular Army. Unfortunately Aden’s new government quickly turned Marxist-Leninist and switched the Dhofar rebellion from being merely troublesome at the time that Richard John’s letter had attracted me to sign up, to a seriously escalating conflict soon after my arrival in Oman.

  A few months before, in December 1967,
major arms supplies and military leaders, well trained in the Soviet Union, arrived over the ‘Aden’ (Yemen) border, and within weeks of their arrival an adoo ambush killed five SAF soldiers and wounded seven. SAF vehicles were increasingly blown up by mines and their bases targeted by heavy mortar fire.

  China, Peter added, was now vying with the Soviets to pour in arms and advisers, as well as providing guerrilla training at the Anti-Imperialist School in Beijing.

  Helicopters were far too expensive for the Sultan, whose budget was dependent mainly upon dates and a £1 million annual gift from the British government. So when men were wounded and needed evacuation, donkeys were the only answer, and then only when the often precipitous terrain permitted.

  Richard John from my regiment, badly wounded in the chest and shoulder during a patrol far from his mountain base, was laid across the back of a donkey and jolted over rocky ground for twelve hours in order to reach the nearest level clearing where the Sultan’s only light Beaver aircraft could land. He was in great pain but there was only enough morphine for three hours. He finally reached hospital treatment and surgery some thirty-six hours after being wounded.

  * Locations are approximate

  Leaving my brother officers playing interminable games of poker in our Bahrain hotel, I wandered the nearby streets, and in a minor hotel’s restaurant decided to test my Arabic on a local. I noticed, sitting at a table by himself, an Arab gentleman wearing spectacles and whose dress and hairstyle looked different to any other Arab that I had observed in Bahrain. I ordered coffee and asked if I could share his table.

  Unfortunately he replied in immaculate English, and when I did ask him if I could practise my Arabic, he replied with a strange and, to me, unidentifiable accent.

  He was, he explained, on his way back from a teacher conference in Bahrain where he had been invited to explain his own religion to a specialist gathering of Imams. He was an Iraqi Kurd from a region of desert foothills west of the great Iraqi city of Mosul. He was, he also told me, of the Yazidi faith, and when I showed no particular reaction to this statement, he waxed eloquent in describing his beliefs.

  Many Muslims, he told me, hated Yazidis and would love to eradicate them, believing them to be devil-worshippers. This, he assured me, was rubbish. In fact, he went on, they believed that God had given the Devil certain powers at the time that he was thrown out of Heaven, and Yazidis merely acknowledged him to keep him from doing them harm.

  Originally Muslims, they had added touches of Christianity, Buddhism and animism to their core beliefs. Their clothes included long white shirts, smart coats and caps over braided plaits. Once a year they offered the sacrifice of a bull to the Sun, and on religious feast days they danced and sang to express their joy at being alive. Their eccentricities include never mentioning the name of the Devil (Shaitan) nor even the sound ‘sh’ at the beginning of any word. They shun the colour blue, and never wear clothing which has an opening down the front. Nor will they eat a lettuce. Hardly a religion posing a threat to anyone.

  I didn’t meet another Yazidi for some fifty years, nor did I even hear mention of their strange faith until in 2014 when the ISIS (IS) Caliphate group attempted to wipe them out en masse. But my Bahrain coffee companion remains in my memory as a happy, simple man, and it was he who first defined the three main sects of Islam that he told me, on learning of my total ignorance of all things Islamic, I would meet in Oman.

  Why, I remember him asking me, did I, a Christian, wish to fight for a Muslim army? I explained that I had joined up unaware that any real fighting was involved and that to me there was no basic difference of any import between Jews, Muslims and Christians, since we all believed in the same God.

  I would soon discover, he assured me, and held his arm up high, as I imagine he did to his students for emphasis, that there was among many Muslims a great hatred of Christians, Jews and of Islamic faiths which differed in any way from their own.

  ‘You have come,’ he told me, ‘from a land of cold people to a hot land of hot people. We Yazidi do not wish to kill a man because his belief is different from ours. Some laugh and say that we always live in mountains where the cool winds blow away anger.’

  I recorded his advice in my diary and have no reason, even now, to doubt its wisdom. He said that I had chosen well to work with Omanis, because they were mostly of the Ibadhi faith and so less likely to murder those of other faiths, unlike mainline Sunni and Shia adherents.

  The history of Oman’s specific brand of Islam, Ibadhism, is not a happy one. The records are long and detailed, but to keep things simple I will only mention key events.

  With the rise of Islam in the second quarter of the seventh century AD, Oman was one of the first countries to convert, but also, within a couple of decades, one of the first to split from the central Sunni belief that the Prophet Mohammed’s successors, known as Caliphs, should always be hereditary and not elected by the people.

  In AD 656, when the fourth Caliph was murdered, the Kharijite group broke away from the main body of Islam and demanded that all future Caliphs be elected. The next Caliph, two years later, led an army against the dissenters and massacred twelve thousand. However, two survivors, who fled to Oman, successfully evangelized their creed which altered the name of its followers to Ibadhis.

  By AD 694 the Caliphate’s court was in Baghdad and from there sent a great army to bring the Omanis back from their schism. The two brothers who ruled Oman at the time resisted the Baghdadi attack and also extended Omani rule to certain coastal tracts of East Africa where, legend has it, they also began to hunt for the indigenous people for slavery on a grand scale.

  Another two armies from Baghdad followed in quick succession and finally vanquished the Omani forces with terrible slaughter. Nonetheless Oman managed to continue electing its own Imam and ignoring the Caliphate. The next Caliph of Baghdad, the self-styled Bloodshedder, is remembered for his cruelty: on one occasion, when brought the decapitated head of an enemy, he cut out the tongue and threw it to his favourite cat. He was also famous for sleeping with all four thousand of his concubines.

  Of the next nineteen Caliphs after the Bloodshedder, nine died of poisoning, being starved to death or other forms of assassination.

  By the year 900 the then Caliph Mutadhil Billoh ordered troops from Bahrain to subjugate the Omanis with an army of 25,000 men, including 3,500 cavalry, many clad in the new chain mail of that era.

  The Imam’s head was cut off, and the hands, ears and eyes of the nobles of Nizwa were removed. The Bahraini general also mutilated the inhabitants, burnt their Ibadhi books and destroyed their vital falaj irrigation system, of which more later.

  Soon afterwards, having overrun Syria, pillaged Iraq and sacked the holy city of Mecca, where he left 30,000 corpses rotting in the streets, the anti-Muslim general Abu Tahir of the Carmathians from Iraq attacked Oman and terrified the Imamate there. However, the voting system was clearly still flourishing in Oman since, in 996 alone, sixteen Imams were voted in and then thrown out. By the year 1000 the Baghdadi Caliphate had lost all influence and the Imams were left thereafter to their own Ibhadi ways.

  In all my time spent with Omani soldiers, with whom I had many discussions about religions, I never heard a bad word said about another faith. Like me, they directed their hostility against Marxists who were ‘Anti-God’, rather than venting their ire on different versions of their own creed.

  I have no record of when the BOAC workers gave up their strike, but after a week in Bahrain, the flight we were told to check in for turned out to be by way of an ancient Fokker aircraft on charter to the Sultan which had a cooling system that worked only after takeoff. When we stopped off at Sharjah, we baked in our Fokker as in an oven.

  The stewardess wore a skimpy miniskirt and a most un-Islamic orange vest which accentuated her very fine figure. She gave each passenger a water bottle and was herself a welcome distraction from the suffocating heat.

  We flew high above the blue-grey haze of
the Mussundam Peninsula mountains, vibrating and bumping in violent thermals until, suddenly, the blue-green waters of the Gulf of Oman lay below. I studied my Oman fact sheet and found that out of a total Arabian coastline of 4,000 miles, almost one quarter belongs to Oman. Covering one hundred thousand square miles, most of it uninhabited, Oman is shaped like a boomerang with Muscat at its crook.

  The Fokker lost height and I watched fascinated as the outlines of great fish were clearly delineated: sharks in pools, long-tailed rays and schools of fat dolphins.

  Without warning, we roared into a narrow cliff-bound gulley, so narrow that both wingtips seemed to scrape along a rock face. Then with a heart-wrenching thud we landed. We had reached the country that we eight latterday men of the Raj had come to save from Marxist domination – or, to use a much-used leftist quip about the military, ‘to travel the world, see colourful people and kill them’.

  We were at Bayt al Falaj which, translated literally, means Home of the Drain. It was Oman’s main airport and close to a fort with crenellated mud walls that housed the headquarters of my new employers, the Sultan’s Armed Forces.

  The black tarmac runnels between each massive block of runway concrete literally hissed and sizzled in the midday heat, and the white glare made it impossible to open both eyes.

  My shirt was stuck to my back and shoulders as I climbed down the steps from the Fokker. The wonderful orange outline of our stewardess waved us off with the words, ‘Allah protect you.’

  In the shade of the nearby Customs shed we were greeted by a corpulent major with a moustache, thick rimmed spectacles and weighing at least seventeen stone. God knows how he stood the heat. He was, we soon learnt, nicknamed The Drum.

  ‘Sling your gear in my Land Rover,’ he told us. ‘I’ll debrief you in the Mess in an hour,’ he added, waving in the general direction of a low-lying hut.