One of the problems of fighting in Dhofar was the unusual nature of the terrain. The Salalah plain – the Jarbib – was locked in by a horseshoe-shaped massif, twenty-five miles long and seven miles wide, with both sides closing in on the sea. The central area of the massif, the Qarra Mountains, was a thousand feet lower than the three-thousand-foot ‘shoulders’, and this configuration acted as a windtrap, snagging the Indian monsoon from June to September. During monsoon season, Jebel Qarra lay shrouded under a blanket of water-vapour – the only patch on the entire coast of southern Arabia that had regular rainfall. Here, deep clefts and sheer valleys bristled with dense shrubbery as thick as a jungle, and water cut down ancient wadis into deep pools dappled by reeds and ferns, forested in sycamore, acacia, myrtle and jasmine. The monsoon gave the advantage to the guerrillas, because the pea-soup mist meant that ground forces had to operate without air-cover or artillery support. The Sultan’s air force had only one helicopter and two ‘Skyvan’ transport aircraft, and resupply had to be effected by camel-train.
The hill tribesmen, collectively known as the Jebali, were of a distinct character from the camel-rearing Bedu of the Najd – the gravel plains beyond the mountains, bordering on the vast dune-sea of the Empty Quarter. Prickly, suspicious, avaricious and fierce, they spoke ancient Himyaritic languages rather than Arabic, wore their hair in tight ringlets bound with strips of leather, herded dwarf cattle, and dwelt in caves and thatched stone huts. The dominant tribe of the region was the Qarra, to one of whose sub-groups, the Bayt Ma’ashini, most of Salim Mubarak’s crew belonged. If the SAS could induce men like these – born and bred in the jebel – to fight against their old comrades, it could turn the tide.
This was a ploy straight out of the ‘Kitson counter-insurgency manual’, but the idea of recruiting SEPs – ‘Surrendered Enemy Personnel’ – as combat teams rather than as guides or scouts was down to Major Tony Jeapes, MC, victor of the Sabrina diversion on Jebel Akhdar eleven years earlier. Jeapes had recently returned from the Devons & Dorsets to command D Squadron, 22 SAS.
Landing in Dhofar hot on the heels of Farnes’s troop, Jeapes interviewed Salim Mubarak at Umm al-Gawarif, over sweet, milky British army tea. He found the ex-rebel impressive. Salim told Jeapes that he knew the mountains like the palm of his hand – especially the eastern area, of which he’d been the DLF second-in-command. It transpired that Salim had been trained in China, and knew the techniques of psychological warfare even better than Jeapes did. Not only did he suggest ways of inducing more DLF-men to defect, he also said that if the SAS could provide the weapons and training, he could raise a ‘Firgat’ (correctly firga: a ‘band’, ‘team’ or ‘company’) that would ‘grow until it was a thousand strong and … would sweep the jebel from end to end’. He said that he would call his team the ‘Firgat as-Salahadin’, after the great Kurdish fighter against the Crusaders.
A week later Jeapes flew to Muscat, where he put the idea of raising firag (the British anglicized the plural to ‘Firgats’) to the commander of the Sultan’s armed forces, Brigadier John Graham. He proposed raising a thousand Jebali, equipping them with 7.62mm FN rifles and providing them with proper training and support. At first, Graham seemed hostile. He suggested that if ‘support’ meant General Purpose Machine Guns and mortars, the Firgats might hand the weapons over to the insurgents. He asked how they would manage radio communications, when many of the Jebali didn’t even speak Arabic. Jeapes replied that the SAS would have to handle comms and support themselves – an impossible task, he admitted, for a team of only troop strength. He would need to deploy the whole of D Squadron. Jeapes thought Graham was about to give him the brush-off, when suddenly the Brigadier grinned, and said, ‘Don’t worry. I was being Devil’s advocate. I like it. I like it.’1
The recruitment of local Dhofaris was one aspect of a ‘Five Fronts’ plan Johnny Watts had drawn up prior to the coup d’état. The emphasis of the scheme, though, remained on convincing the population that they would get a better deal under Qabus than under the Communists. Watts’s agenda encompassed the setting up of an intelligence cell to collect data and run ops to demoralize the rebels, the establishment of a psy-ops team to persuade DLF fighters to defect, the provison of medical and veterinary assistance, and a civil aid programme that would include water-drilling, road-building and sanitation.
One limitation on aggressive actions was the need to prevent SAS casualties. Watts’s last words to Jeapes before he left Hereford were, ‘Whatever you do, you must not have casualties … Because if you do that will be it – finished. We will be withdrawn.’2 At this stage, the Regiment’s presence in Dhofar was secret – SAS teams were officially posted to Sharjah. The Ministry of Defence hadn’t yet even permitted the deployment of SAS patrols in tactical areas, and Watts didn’t want his men being shipped out with suspicious gunshot wounds, and awkward questions asked. Not until December did an MOD spokesman admit that the Regiment was in Dhofar, and then announced it was there ‘purely for training purposes’.3
By the following February, over two hundred ex-DLF fighters had come in. These included men from the notoriously prickly Bait Kathir, some of whom were camel-nomads rather than hillmen and spoke Arabic as a mother-tongue. The Bait Kathir Firgat was mustered under legendary sharpshooter Musallim bin Tafl, who had accompanied explorer and ex-SAS-man Wilfred Thesiger on his first crossing of the Empty Quarter. By then, Salim Mubarak’s Firgat as-Salahadin was completing its training at Mirbat – a small town forty miles east of Salalah. Its instructors were D Squadron’s ‘Boat Troop’ under Captain Ian Crooke, ex-King’s Own Scottish Borderers, an irascible twenty-five-year-old Scotsman.
To get along with the Firgat-men, the SAS had to reach across a wide cultural gulf. First of all, it was difficult for the SAS, whose allegiance was to Squadron and Regiment, to grasp how SEPs could turn so readily on their former mates. For the Jebali, changing sides wasn’t a moral problem, as their first loyalty lay always with their family and tribe, not with the MPFLOAG fighters. Similarly, while the SAS hierarchy was a rank-structure imposed from outside, the Jebali saw themselves as individuals entitled to make their own decisions. Their chiefs were ‘the first among equals’ who held authority by mutual consent. If individuals disagreed with their sheikh’s decisions, they would simply turn to another.
Their attitude to fighting was equally hard to fathom. The hillmen and Bedu lived by the cult of reputation, and in battle they considered the idea of concealment – ‘hiding from the enemy’ – something of a disgrace. Since fighting was to them more of a sport than a deadly struggle for survival, they tended to fight hard, but withdraw when they felt like taking a rest. Since they considered that they were in the hands of God, they took what the SAS considered to be unnecessary risks, and were improvident with food and water. They would ask the BATT teams boldly for anything they wanted, and didn’t believe it was necessary to show gratitude.
Despite this gap in perspective, the Firgats and the SAS developed a mutual respect. The Arabs were tough and courageous warriors, and could move incredibly fast in the local terrain, though they had a cultural prejudice against carrying heavy loads. The BATT-teams developed a modus operandi using the Firgats as fast-moving scouts, while the SAS were the workhorses, lugging the heavy weapons and radios in their Bergens. ‘The Jebali Arabs … were … extremely loyal to people they accepted,’ wrote Tpr. Brummie Stokes, ex-Green Jackets, an SAS Arabic-speaker attached to the Firgat. ‘We, of course, were all “infidels”… but that apart, appeared all right in their eyes; they mucked in with the rest of us.’4
By the end of the month, Ian Crooke thought the thirty-two-man Firgat as-Salahadin ready for its first operation. Jeapes was aware that the first op had to be a success, and planned an attack from the sea on the village of Sudh, about twenty miles along the coast from Mirbat. Intel had indicated that the adoo were gathering there in strength. The Firgat landed by motorized boom on 23/4 February, supported by two SAS troops, to find there were no adoo i
n the town. A half-hearted ‘counter-attack’ by a pair of rebels that night was cut abruptly short when an SAS team demolished the enemy position with missiles from an 84mm Carl-Gustav rocket-launcher.
The Sudh operation paved the way for a more ambitious task – a show of strength on the jebel to encourage other DLF-men to defect, and to demonstrate that the mountains weren’t impregnable. Before this could be put into effect, though, Salim Mubarak was diagnosed with angina pectoris by SAS medic Tpr. Nick Downie, ex-21 SAS, a former fourth-year medical student. Despite Downie’s expertise, Jeapes refused to believe it. When Salim died in his sleep the same night, the Firgat-men immediately suspected he’d been poisoned, and only just stopped short of opening fire on their SAS trainers.
On 13 March two SAS troops under Ian Crooke, and two Firgats of about sixty men under a new chief, Mohammad Sa’id, toiled three thousand feet up the shoulder of the Jebel above Mirbat, by night. The force occupied a point on the plateau named the ‘Eagle’s Nest’, and waited for the adoo’s response. When nothing happened after three days, they moved across the plateau to a water source at Tawi Atair, engaging a three-man picket on the way, and wiping them out. The adoo retaliated by stonking their position with a 60mm mortar. Crooke had a three-inch mortar flown in by heli, and his men started lobbing mortar-bombs back.
One infuriating factor was that while the SAS had been supplied with sub-standard bombs, some of them made in India, the guerrillas were using the best British-made product. ‘… There are some people in Britain willing to sell anything to anybody in return for a fast buck,’ wrote Peter Ratcliffe;’… there are too many influential figures with their fingers in the till, for there to be any chance of mere soldiers getting the trade … stopped.’5
The water at Tawi Atair was three hundred feet down, and proved impossible to get at. Dehydration became a more perilous threat than the DLF. Though a second Firgat group moved up to relieve them, killing half a dozen rebels on the way, moisture-loss became so severe that Jeapes decided to pull the troops out after twelve days. ‘The soldiers were willing to go on,’ he wrote, ‘but their lined and gaunt faces betrayed the effects of lack of water and lack of sleep.’6 Ian Crooke’s condition horrified the OC – he was suffering not only from dehydration but also from hepatitis. Despite having cut the op short, Jeapes considered it a success. They had shown the adoo that they could operate on the jebel, had taken out nine enemy dead, and encouraged more defections from the DLF.
The next move was to establish a firm foothold on the plateau. Op Jaguar was put in after the monsoon that year, when Jeapes’s D Squadron had been replaced by A and G Squadrons. The largest operation mounted so far, it consisted of a hundred SAS-men and three hundred Firgats, supported by two hundred and fifty men of the Sultan’s Armed Forces. Jaguar was a major victory for the government – the rebels were pushed back into the deep wadis on the jebel. Although marred by the Firgats’ refusal to fight throughout the fasting month of Ramadan – a development that exasperated Johnny Watts – the combined forces established two permanent bases in the hills, at Jibjat and Madinat al-Haq. They also set up a defensive line – the ‘Leopard Line’ – to prevent the movement of arms to the guerrillas from the Yemen. By the end of the op, SAS and Firgats had taken possession of most of the eastern jebel, including the Midway Road.
81. ‘Jesus wept!’
When he heard the first mortar-bombs chafing the sky over Mirbat, coughing up smoke and debris among the mud-brick houses, Cpl. ‘Lab’ Labalaba ramped across rocky ground to the gendarmes’ fort. He hurled himself into the gun-pit under its walls, where an Omani artilleryman, Walid Khamis, was manning an ancient twenty-five-pounder field-gun. Labalaba, ex-Irish Rangers, one of a dozen Fijians in the Regiment, grabbed an HE shell. As Walid snapped open the breech, Labalaba slid the round home with massive hands. The two men ducked as the shell whoffed out, gouging a brilliant yellow gash through the greyness of first light.
The shell caromed into the escarpment about six hundred metres away, slapping stone, firebursting in a starfish of flame and debris. As soon as the smoke cleared, rebel soldiers popped up from the dark slopes, trolling casually towards the perimeter wire, and Labalaba realized that Mirbat was under attack.
It was 19 July 1972, bang in the middle of the monsoon, and the sky was a gunmetal haze of dribbling cloud. The adoo had used the cover of the monsoon to collect in numbers on the jebel, for an unheard-of frontal assault. Stung by the SAS–Firgat successes of the last six months, especially Jaguar, they were determined to make a spectacular show. Their intention was to capture the town, kill the Wali, make a propaganda speech, and melt back into the hills.
Mirbat was a small fishing port standing on a blunt headland on a curve in the Dhofar coast. Forty miles from Salalah, and a stone’s throw from the ancient ruins at Samhuram, it was a pale imitation of the great trading civilization that had existed here two thousand years earlier, when Dhofar was the main supplier of frankincense, a priceless commodity used in religious ceremonies. It was the peculiar nature of Dhofar’s geography that provided the almost unique conditions for the cultivation of frankincense trees. Frankincense still grew on the northern downslopes of the jebel, where the mountains gave way to the great gravel flats of the Nejd.
The town itself was a warren of mud-brick buildings sited on the southern side of a shallow wadi. On the northern side, near the beach, stood the Wali’s fort, occupied by a squad of gendarmes, looming over a dog’s-leg of market stalls. Slightly behind it stood the BATT-house – an oblong building with high sealed windows and walls pickled like beef jerky by sun and salt. The BATT house had been the headquarters of the SAS training team in Mirbat since the Regiment’s first arrival in Dhofar. About five hundred metres away to the north-east, across undulating ground littered with egg-shaped boulders, the main fort stood on a hump, dominating the ground around it. The building was a medieval-style redoubt with double doors and an octagonal tower, also occupied by gendarmes. The gun-pit lay under the eaves of the fort, about forty metres short of the wire perimeter fence that ran all the way around the town.
Minutes before Labalaba had reached the pit, two hundred and fifty rebels had overrun the eight-man picket of gendarmes on Jebel ‘Ali – a high ridge about six hundred metres north of the wire. Their plan had been for a sneak attack, but the gendarmes had spotted them. A single shot had blown their silent approach, and instead they rushed the position with a Shoagin machine gun crackling and Kalashnikov AK47s tracklining fire.
In minutes four gendarmes were dead, and the others skeetering for their lives. A thousand paces away to the north, on the slopes of Jebel Samhan, half-a-dozen rebel mortar-crews punked bombs. Tube muzzles flared. Bombs slashed damp sky across two-thousand-metre parabolas, cannonading into hard ground and soft mud buildings in Mirbat town.
Half a klick to the south-west of Labalaba’s position, on the roof of the rambling BATT-house, Captain Mike Kealy and his crew heard the thump, saw the spurt of flame from the gun-pit. They clocked muzzle-flak from the direction of Jebel ‘Ali, heard the clack of small-arms fire, heard enemy mortar-shells shilling over and chundering in. Tracer blickered out of the half-light, riddling sandbags, whiplashing sand. An 84mm anti-tank rocket rasped air, howled overhead.
For a second, BATT-boss Kealy couldn’t get his head round the scene. A twenty-seven-year-old former Queens Regiment officer from Farnborough, he’d been with the Regiment only a year, and this was his first taste of action. His first thought was that the Firgat he’d sent out two days ago had come in, and got into a blue-on-blue shooting-match with the guard. He was quickly put right when his radio-op, Tpr. ‘Tak’ Takavesi – another Fijian – reported that the forty-strong Firgat was still out on the coastal plain. This told Kealy two things. First, that they were about to get bumped by a large and well-supported rebel force. Second, that, since there were few ‘Firgat-men’ in town, its defence was down to his eight-man SAS-team and about thirty poorly-trained Omani gendarmes.
Kealy heard nearby gumfs of fire, and took a moment to click that Tpr. Harris was letting rip with the team’s own three-inch mortar in the sangar below. Bombs dopplered towards the ridge. Concussions kettledrummed at two-second intervals. An instant later the General Purpose Machine-Gun and the half-inch Browning dug into sandbagged positions on the roof, ruckled fire. Behind the Gimpie, Tpr. Pete Wignall hooked steel, high-angled 7.62mm tracer. On the Browning, Tpr. Roger Chapman cracked off rounds. Brass cases chinged on roof boards. Cordite fumes lufted. The Gimpie brattled drumfire. The Browning throbbed.
At the gun-pit, the shroud of enemy gunfire was shifting closer, slugs splotching shoffs of sand around Labalaba and Walid. The rebels weren’t yet on the perimeter wire, but they soon would be. Two gendarmes in the ammo-pit behind them were belting rounds through the fence. One of them was hit and snapped off his feet. The other stopped firing. Labalaba boosted another round into the breech. Walid grunted, staggered, hurled blood. Labalaba saw him go down out of the corner of his eye, but whamped the shell into the chamber, locked it closed, fired the gun. The round sledgehammered out, whoofing smoke as the barrel jerked back. Labalaba yokked the breech open, ejected the case, grabbed another shell. AK47 rounds mosquitoed, scalloping sandbags. Labalaba felt a smacking punch to the jaw, and went reeling. He blacked out for a second, and when he came round his chin didn’t seem to be there any more, and his face was gushing blood.
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