Magazine content is available exclusively for TIME subscribers.TRUCIAL OMAN: Blood, Sand & Oil
For more than a year, Britain has carried on a sort of comic-opera blockade around the oasis of Buraimi. a cluster of 8,000 Arabs in mud-walled villages not far from the Persian Gulf. Last week the blockade abruptly lost its comic flavor. There was shooting in the desert and blood on the sand.
Fired by the belief that oil may lie under Buraimi's sand, strong-willed old
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...
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