Heat

by Ranulph Fiennes

  Tim became a special adviser to his old army friend Qaboos, and substantial support, in the form of helicopters and jet-fighters, was soon forthcoming from Jordan, along with thousands of crack troops from the Shah of Persia and valuable support from both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

  World oil prices doubled in a few years, and by 1975 Omani annual income reached £300 million.

  PFLOAG’s support from the Yemen and the Soviet Union eventually withered away as prosperity blossomed for the people of Oman. Within two years of his succession, Qaboos had wells drilled in Dhofari villages without ready supplies, and a deep-water harbour was constructed west of Salalah so that Dhofar was no longer cut off in the monsoon months. Sixty hospitals were built with free medicine for all, and by 1973 the number of students (of both sexes) in Omani schools exceeded 34,000.

  Now, more than forty years after his succession, Sultan Qaboos remains today the most popular absolute ruler in Arabia, some say in the world.

  During the troubled times of the Arab Spring, many rulers, from Morocco to the Yemen, were removed one by one, but not Qaboos. I like to think that the wonderful men in my one-time family, Recce Platoon, played a key part at a key time in staving off an all-out adoo attack on Salalah when Qaboos would have been Number One on PFLOAG’s Death List.

  Tim Landon loved the Omanis in particular, but all things Arab fascinated him. We spent hours in my room or his at Umm al Ghawarif during my rests there between the weeks in the desert or the ambush stints.

  We agreed with the generalization that, although all humans since their beginnings have fought and killed one another for often paltry reasons, those tribes living in the hot regions of the world have proved to be the most fractious and, once attached to a particular belief, the most ardent and, often enough down the ages, the most fundamentalist (with a number of obvious exceptions such as the Christians’ Inquisition and the Nazis’ Holocaust).

  Islam, Tim argued, originated in the great heat of the Empty Quarter. Mohammed and most of his original disciples came from isolated desert villages such as Medina and Mecca, but their DNA was that of the desert nomad. To cope with life in the inferno of the Sands meant the survival of the fittest. And of the most determined. Such people were fiercely loyal to their leaders, their religion, tribe and tradition. They were at their best under extreme conditions. They had no tradition of civilization or specific architectural identity. For them black tents, not Taj Mahals or ancient abbeys. Where materialistic riches simply did not exist, God had no rival in Mammon. When Mohammed announced Islam, God’s favour became attainable but only if you obeyed to the letter the Quran’s instructions as understood by your specific mullah.

  The race to convert the denizens of the hot countries, especially Africa and Arabia, to either Christianity or Islam was definitely balanced in favour of Mohammed not Christ.

  After all, great heat encourages visions to meld with reality like mirages and asceticism can easily become unhealthily important, leading seamlessly to fanaticism whereby a Mohammed or a Mahdi can exhort the hordes to devastating effect, timing with cunning the date of an uprising or a genocide of unbelievers to coincide with hot and humid weather.

  Additionally Mohammed’s team hit on great ingredients for their new religion of Islam which, unlike the other religions, was custom-built to appeal to Arab and African warrior alike.

  To write about heat is to write about Islam, just as a treatise on cold would invariably discuss Eskimos and their codes of conduct.

  Islam allows four wives and divorce is simple – highly appealing to both nomadic and African tribes where polygamy had long been a practice. Women are inferior to Muslim men, according to the Quran, and Paradise, obtainable for instance through jihad, opens the door to an eternity of sensual delights.

  Women do badly compared with their counterparts in most other religions, but then again this has always been the case in most nomadic Arab and tribal African societies, so a majority of their women have come to accept their status.

  Christianity, by comparison, works badly in hot climates. The clothes of their missionaries in their tight jackets, cravats and trousers and their women in their whalebone corsets and heavy dresses made no sense compared with cool Arab gowns. African authorities accepted slavery and polygamy as did the Quran, but not so Christianity. Mosques were designed to be cool, unlike churches.

  The origins of Oman’s history are not precise but can be divided into two main DNA sources: those who arrived from the south, from the Yemen (the Yemeni), and those who came later out of the northern deserts of northern Arab nomadic stock (the Nizari).

  Oman, one of the very first lands to adopt Islam during the lifetime of the Prophet, soon rebelled against paying the Prophet’s Council (my term) an annual tax (zakat) and obeying their central diktats. Instead they strove to worship under a religious leader (Imam) whom they would vote in or out as they pleased rather than the hereditary descendants of the Prophet.

  To this end was formed an Islamic sect favoured by all Omanis called Ibadhism, which was inaugurated at the time of Ali, the fourth hereditary Caliph of Mecca.

  The current Sultan’s dynasty, the Albu Saids, managed to institute hereditary rule in Muscat in 1744 and they have ruled in the city and along the Omani coast since then, but with frequent revolts in the interior led by various Imams based usually at Nizwa.

  In the same year Wahabism, a new Islamic sect, was founded by Mohammed Wahab who denounced all Islamic practices that had over the centuries diverged from the dictates of the original tenets laid down in the Quran. His disciples were told to destroy all who professed Islam but not in the Wahabi way.

  The denizens of the Gulf whose income was largely gained through piracy and slavery embraced Wahabism and murdered all captives who professed other beliefs. In 1801 they invaded Iraq and sacked the Holy City of the Shias.

  Their pirate fleets terrorized the seas off Oman and India and were the reason that the Muscat Sultans first asked the British for help. One East India Company horse-trading ship commanded by a Captain Sawbridge was captured by pirates from Ras al Khaimah. Sawbridge complained bitterly, so the pirates used a sail needle and thick twine to sew his lips together. They then burnt his ship, along with all its cargo of horses. Only after many years did the British navy eventually eradicate the Wahabi pirates.

  Out of the hottest of the world’s deserts came the northern Arabs who, in the seventh century, swept out of Arabia to form their empire. No country withstood their ferocity and within a single century they ruled from the shores of the Atlantic to the borderlands of China united by the words of their Prophet.

  The most unwarlike and tolerant Arabs in the world, however, are today the direct descendants of the original north desert warriors of Oman and the Gulf States.

  The intolerant Muslim groups, such as al-Qaeda, Islamic State, Boko Haram and al-Shabaab, state their aim as the formation of a new Caliphate to ‘correct’ the great crime of the British and French colonial powers who, in 1916, instituted the imperial carve-up of the Middle East and Africa and established artificial borders that have caused so much ongoing conflict.

  The Sykes-Picot Agreement decided how best (from an Anglo-French viewpoint) to carve up the Ottoman Empire after the Great War. Islamic State, Boko Haram and their stablemates wish to abolish the artificial borders of this imperial geography which often ignored physical terrain and ethnic groupings and later caused murderous chaos between Muslims and Hindus in India. The IS concept is forcefully to establish their Islamic Caliphate as a new religious-based territory with completely new boundaries governed by Sharia Law.

  IS did not create the chaos in Syria (where, in 2015, eleven million people out of a population of twenty-two million have been displaced from their homes and often their livelihood), but they have used it to their advantage.

  So what did spark off the Syrian crisis? I would contend that climate change in the form of great heat fermented the rot in a land already riven b
y inter-sectarian hatreds, a bossy government and Great Power rivalries.

  Poor harvests at the time, causing brutal global price rises for staple foods, plus a cruel drought in Syria resulted in mass movements from the baked countryside into Damascus, Aleppo and other towns and rising anger against the Assad government. A variation of this same equation is present in northern Nigeria and other lands in the Sahel zone where more heat and less rain lead to social disruption, with determined and brutal groups taking advantage of the general state of misery and anger.

  In Oman, one of the hottest countries on Earth, the inhabitants have over the centuries adapted to the heat, as have the Eskimos (Inuit) to extreme cold. Furthermore, their unique and hitherto reliable source of water, and hence food, and their mountain ranges, means that social panic instigated by climate change is avoided. They have Ibhadism, but not an equivalent of IS or al-Shabaab. And we helped bring about the downfall of PFLOAG.

  Despite their warlike forebears, the Omanis Tim and I had met were the most peaceful and tolerant of people. I once asked Ali Nasser why nobody in the platoon had ever, to my knowledge, said a single bad word about Israelis or Jews, and he replied without thinking, ‘Because nobody ever told us to think badly of them.’

  CHAPTER 14

  The Heat before the Cold

  I left the Sultan’s Army in 1970, a month before my boss, the Sultan, was deposed, because my eight-year contract with the British Army was finished and, much as I had fallen in love with Oman, and especially with Dhofar, I disliked the idea of signing on as a contract ‘mercenary’ officer.

  I was also keen to marry Ginny, although we hadn’t decided exactly when. However, I sensed that she was getting fed up with a marriage date which, like a desert mirage, kept fading into the distance. She was very attractive and I remembered the saying, ‘Out of sight, out of mind’; I feared I might lose her if I stayed on in Oman.

  So one day at our remote camp overlooking the Dehedoba trail I said goodbye to the men of Recce Platoon. For me and, I like to think, for some of them, it was a sad parting. I told them that I would hope to come back to Dhofar and that I would see them again. I thanked them for being like a family to me for such a long time and for being the best and the bravest of soldiers.

  Later that year I married Ginny and moved up to her cottage in the far north of Scotland where she had a job with the Scottish National Trust. We agreed to run expeditions together and, since they would have to be fully sponsored as we had no money, we would need to move to London in order to visit the hundreds of potential support companies more easily.

  From our new home in a very grotty basement flat in Earls Court just beside the Tube station (purchase price £7,000), I applied for a position as captain with the SAS Reserve Squadron in Hereford, but the major in charge, remembering my removal from the Regular SAS Regiment four years earlier (for blowing up civilian property with army explosives) would only take me on as a trooper. The pay was useless, so when, after a year with the Squadron, a vacancy came up for a captain with the London 21 SAS Regiment, I took it.

  We lived a hand-to-mouth existence earning what we could when we could. Lecturing about the Nile in town halls in the London suburbs to audiences of lonely old folk earned us £18 a go.

  Ginny evolved a plan to achieve the first ever surface journey around Earth, travelling not horizontally but vertically through both Poles. We spent the next seven years organizing this challenge. Nobody paid us so we alternated the preparation with paid media missions.

  The boss of Independent Television News (ITN), Don Horobin, asked me to take one of his film teams to Oman to interview Sultan Qaboos, and I was given a crash course in TV news reportage by Peter Snow, the ITN newscaster, and others.

  We then spent two months in Oman, where Ginny worked with Save the Children charity projects in various villages, including Nizwa and Sohar. Staffed by dedicated volunteer nurses, their clinics did great service in areas where previously there were no facilities.

  My ITN film crew consisted of two technicians with a wealth of frontline experience in Belfast. This was fortunate because we were reporting from the army outpost of Simba overlooking the South Yemeni border. The film crew revelled in recording the action as PFLOAG mortar bombs slammed about our foxhole.

  The SAS refused to let me film them training their ex-communist counter-guerrilla bands, so I recorded an old friend, still a captain in SAF, leading a ferocious-looking line of Dhofari tribesmen charging downhill with their automatics blazing.

  Another media-paid outing to Oman in 1986 involved researching and describing a lethal nineteenth-century battle between the British and Omani rebels. This entailed my return to the lands of the same Beni bu Ali tribe who had menaced my own 1968 Recce patrol into the Sharqiyah and Ja’alan districts to recruit for the Sultan’s Army. They had blocked our way up the Wadi Tayyin and, later that same year, had clashed with another tribe, killing dozens in a massacre, news of which had even made it into the Times newspaper.

  Back in 1820 the same tribe had excelled at coastal piracy, and a British envoy working with the Muscat Sultan was sent to warn them of Royal Navy retaliation. They killed the envoy so an Anglo-Indian army of a thousand men, artillery and with the Omani Sultan himself up front, was sent to subdue the tribe.

  I drove into Beni bu Ali territory from Muscat with three men, three rifles and an Olympus camera, and located not just one battlefield but five of them, since various Beni bu Ali villages each claimed the site of the battle.

  Each relevant ‘guide’ (all old men) assured me that his tribe had completely wiped out the army of the British ‘Kafirs’ and that the local wadi had run with their blood. I photographed each battle site for good measure. Documents I studied at the British consulate in Muscat did record a Sultanate defeat and the comment that the Sultan had been awarded ‘the sword of honour’ for being wounded while saving the life of a British soldier in the heat of the fray.

  Ginny, meanwhile, lived as the third (nominal) wife of an Omani Sheikh in the mountain village of Ulyah, near Rostaq. She was commissioned by Woman’s Own magazine to describe day-to-day life in a typical harem. She dressed as did the other wives and learnt their ways of cooking, washing clothes in the local falaj and conforming to the normal village rituals. She grew to love her Ulyah family and learnt to speak good Arabic, which was to stand us in good stead over subsequent desert journeys in the Empty Quarter.

  After completing some media work in Dhofar, I joined my old friend Patrick Brook, by then commanding officer of the Sultan’s Armoured Regiment, on a four-day race over the Jebel Akhdar mountain trails at 10,000 feet. Our ten-man team won against a dozen others, and Patrick lent me a Land Rover to go wherever I wished. Driving north to a remote Kawasena village in the Akhdar foothills, I arrived unannounced at the low mud-brick home of my Recce Platoon personal hero, Said Salim. I had not met him for sixteen years and I was bearded, but he recognized me. We clasped shoulders and laughed aloud as I searched his belt for his trademark skinning knife. He shook his head with a grin: ‘No PFLOAG, no knife.’

  Said’s cousin, Salim Khaleefa, ex-Recce corporal, soon joined us and we talked of times past, of battles fought, of near escapes and of where old friends now were. We ate dates and were young again. When the sun began to slide I left them warm at heart with many memories.

  A week later, and organized by Patrick, I joined a single Dhofari officer armed only with a .22 rifle who led me for many miles along the coastline from Rakhyut to Rayzut on the western edge of the Salalah Plain, sleeping on beaches and drinking from springs. I had known this area as the adoo heartland, a region where I had once feared to move even by night and with thirty armed men. There were still mines on the trails, but no adoo.

  Various media-based projects in deserts and jungles gave us a basic income over the years, but they were never predictable. So I kept up my Territorial Army attendance. In 1970 I was sent by the SAS Reserve Squadron in Hereford on a month’s jungle training in Brunei
. My fellow ‘R’ Squadron trooper, Len Sheen, had been a mercenary in the Yemen in the 1960s but, like me, was untrained in the niceties of jungle warfare.

  The RAF Hercules transport plane from Britain was loaded with equipment and some forty Regular SAS soldiers who ignored the two of us Territorials, as though we did not exist. All the bucket seats and other vaguely comfortable nooks on the aircraft were taken, leaving Len and me one metal side of the toilet cubicle to share with our kitbags. The flight stopped for eight hours at an RAF base on the island of Gan in the Maldives. Short of sleep, I dozed off in swimming shorts on a beach beside the airfield. Len woke me a few hours later and I was ashamed to find that I had failed to apply suncream and was burnt lobster-pink over much of my body by the extremely powerful Maldives sun.

  The follow-on flight to Brunei was even more uncomfortable and various parts of my stomach and hips were badly sun-blistered.

  On arrival in Brunei the squadron sergeant major, Wally Poxon, signed each man with food and equipment for the jungle month, all in a bergen rucksack weighing 70 pounds. On parade the RSM Geordie Tindall explained that we would be working in the jungle in groups of four with a veteran SAS instructor and that helicopters would drop us off in different locations. Because my skin where the bergen straps would rub was by then raw, I realized that in jungle conditions blood poisoning would be likely, so I requested a few days’ sick leave before heading for the jungle.

  Both Poxon and Tindall remembered my previous removal from the Regular SAS when I was an officer. They were now entirely unsympathetic. So I took a course of penicillin tablets and plastered duck tape all over the raw skin. In time it healed over.