By November 29, 2017 Read More →

1925 King Ibn Saud of Arabia

  • King Ibn Saud of Saudi ArabiaBy 1920 subdued his Rashidi enemies in the north of the Arabian Peninsula.
  • In 1920 sent his 15 year old son Faisal to the south – western Arab highlands of ASIR to secure allegiance of its people.
  • He did the same with Jawf region on the borders of the newly created emirate of TransJordan.
  • But Ibn Saud was faced with a recurring problem: his undisciplined and ferocious tribal warriors who had no regard or international frontiers, launched raids deep into the territory of Transjordan and Iraq (areas of Hashemite control). British planes and armored cars joined the local tribesman to drive them back with heavy losses.
  • The boundaries between Najd and Kuwait were still not properly defined – and in AnAva where nomad inhabitants, lacked any sense of nationality and were accustomed to wander over huge stretches of desert to find pasturage for their flocks.
  • But the British protectors of Iraq and Kuwait were determined to establish a frontier beyond which Wahhabism was restricted …
  • The British reached an agreement (Sir Perez Cox at al-Hasa) with Ibn Saud and whereby a large slice of territory claimed by Iraq was allocated to the new kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
  • In order to placate Ibn Saud, some two-thirds of the land that has been considered to belong to Kuwait at the time of the 1913 agreement with the Ottoman government became part of Saudi Arabia.

Source: From Ibn Saud, by Peter Mansfield p. 184

Comments are closed.