Word: imam
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When Said bin Taimur, Sultan of Muscat and Oman, appealed to Britain for help in subduing the rebellious and elusive Imam of Oman, no one thought that the affair would require much more than a few passes by R.A.F. fighter planes to scare the rebels into pledging loyalty to the red flag of the Sultan. In the House of Commons, Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd was the very model of long-distance assurance. "It would be an example of military futility," he intoned, "to seek to employ ground forces in those temperatures in desert areas...
What had happened? "Miscalculation," said an editorial in the Times of London. "Mishandled from the start," snapped the Daily Mail. Far from being frightened off by the first sorties of fighter planes (with instructions to strafe only unoccupied forts, cars and donkey carts), the Imam's men had proved themselves much more adept at the use of automatic weapons than anyone had suspected...
...Whitehall the hand-wringing over the prospect of killing anyone changed to hand-wringing over not bringing the silly little war to an end. At last, British military commanders ordered ground and aerial fire against the rebel stronghold of Firq, believed to be held by the Imam's brother, an ambitious scalawag named Talib bin Ali. British commanders also ordered bombing missions against the presumed stronghold of the Imam himself, a palm-ringed, fortified village called Nizwa, ten miles from Firq...
This left Nizwa, still flying the white flag of the Imam, for the British and the Sultan's troops to conquer. But no one was sure that the Imam was really in Nizwa. Perhaps he was at Izz. But no, when the British got there, he was not to be found. In fact, no one knew positively where...
...resort. Instead, after first dropping warning leaflets over Nizwa and its neighboring forts, they sent over the first jet planes that the Omani musketeers had ever seen. After three days and twelve rocket-and-bomb missions, the Sultan's red banner was seen flying in place of the Imam's white flag over the fort at Izki, and old hands at the R.A.F. base at Sharja were saying cheerfully that that was how it always worked in Aden and in the North-West Frontier province...