Word: trucial
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...game of sand-dune diplomacy suddenly twice as important. What if the sheikdom of Kuwait, now the world's richest known oilfield, should sever its connections with Britain and the sterling area? Or if the same idea should occur to oil-rich Qatar and Bahrein, or those shadowy Trucial* Oman sheikdoms, whose rulers, like the Sultan of Muscat and Oman himself, reign over barren sand and hope for oil strikes...
...Arab interest rather than where Europeans had drawn them, rewarding this prince and that sheik, there would be four natural Arab nations: 1) Maghreb in North Africa, 2) the land of the Nile Valley, 3) Arabia Deserta, including not only Saudi Arabia but Yemen and all the little trucial sheikdoms, 4) the Fertile Crescent, stretching from the Mediterranean at Lebanon to the Persian Gulf, and including Syria and Iraq in a unity of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys...
King Ibn Saud claims Buraimi as part of Saudi Arabia; and Britain, as "protector" of Trucial Oman, claims it for a Trucial Oman Sheik and the Sultan of Muscat. Since the summer of 1952, the claimants had fought their siege with angry words and glowering looks. Ibn Saud sent Emir Turki Ibn Utaishan to occupy Buraimi, supposedly in answer to an appeal for protection by the villagers. Britain countered by stationing three young officers and a batch of Trucial Oman levies in a string of Beau Geste mud forts sprinkled around the oasis, to harass and starve the Emir into...
Over the centuries many marauders have come-the rulers of Oman, of Abu Dhabi, the Unitarians of Nejd (ancestors of modern Saudi Arabia)-briefly planted flags, then vanished. In 1869 the Trucial sheiks drove off the last of the Saudi tax collectors. Most conscientious modern geographers simply label Buraimi "undefined." It is a land of shifting sands, shifting tribes and shifting allegiances...
Last August a camel caravan lumbered into Buraimi bearing 40 Saudi officials, clerks and armed men headed by a doughty Arabian named Emir Turki Ibn Utaishan. They started wooing the bewildered inhabitants and chiefs with lavish feasts, silver riyals and sweet talk. Immediately, the Trucial Sheik of Abu Dhabi and the Sultan of Muscat appealed to their "protector" Great Britain to repel the "invaders...