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THE DHOFAR CONFLICT
THE SAS AND COUNTERINSURGENCY
By Stephen Quick
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On 4th December 1975 Brigadier John Akehurst reported to Sultan Qaboos: ‘I have the honour to inform Your Majesty that Dhofar is now secure for civil development’. This brought formally to an end an insurgency that had lasted more than a decade and had seen Oman, supported on the ground by British, Iranian and Jordanian forces achieve a victory over the Marxist-inspired local rebels, the adoo.
There have been a number of books that described their authors’ personal experiences of the campaign in Dhofar, Oman’s southern province. For example, in 1975 Ranulph Fiennes published his own memoir, Where Soldiers Fear To Tread, while the fighting was still underway. Tony Jeapes’s SAS Operation Oman (1981) provided the first description of the war from the perspective of the soldiers in Hereford and then in 1985 Ian Gardiner’s In The Service Of The Sultan brought to life the experience of a seconded officer in an Arab battalion. At the operational level, in 1982 Akehurst’s We Won A War described how Dhofar Brigade had fought its ultimately victorious campaign.
Half a century after Akehurst’s report to the Sultan Stephen Quick’s book has finally provided us with a strategic overview of the Dhofar campaign, as well as examining the way in which it was commanded and how the Sultan’s Armed Forces evolved into a war-winning organisation.
Where once the Dhofar war was often portrayed as a British post-colonial military success, it is now seen in a more balanced way as a triumph of Omani statesmanship and vision, aided by regional (Iranian and Jordanian) diplomatic and military firepower and by British know-how and lethal effect, not least in the form of the squadrons of 22 SAS.
As well as providing the reader with the chronology of a complex campaign, the author also explains the part that the SAS intervention in Dhofar played in the development of special forces’ capabilities in the latter part of the Cold War.
Quick’s book clearly started life as an academic thesis, focusing as it does on the theory of Counterinsurgency (COIN), and was then turned into something for the general reader; as such it is replete with endnotes and references, but sadly it lacks an index.
This book deserves to be read by anyone who is interested in how the Oman of today is the product of a highly successful and enduring counterinsurgency, in which the SAS played a critical part.
Peter Williams
Published by Pen and Sword
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