Oman / Dhofar campaign: catch all

[davidbfpo]

An article by Dr Simon Anglim, whose work IIRC has appeared on SWC, possibly on the Dhofar campaign; id'd via Twitter and from the website The Strategy Bridge in 2014:http://www.thestrategybridge.com/the...bel-war-195759

He starts with:

The years 1955–1959 brought a major insurgency to the Gulf state of Muscat and Oman which, for a while, threatened the integrity of the Omani state. All the key battlefields were in Northern Oman, within 150 miles of the capital, Muscat, and because this is a mountainous region, Omanis remember it as the Djebel (Mountain) War; in the UK it is referred to usually as the Djebel Akhdar campaign, after its climactic battle. Historically, the Djebel War has been almost completely overshadowed by Oman’s other insurgency, Dhofar 1965–1975, which was longer, bigger, bloodier and far better covered in print. However, the Djebel War sends messages in its own right. It was truly ‘complex’, difficult to pigeonhole as either insurgency or civil war and showing many of the characteristics of both, and at the tactical level mixed battalion-level battles, including sieges of fortified areas, with close air support and bombing of the rebel infrastructure, alongside guerrilla warfare, sabotage and terrorism. As strategy, it illustrates limited military force dealing with a potentially major crisis where larger-scale deployments were unacceptable politically.