An insurgency that began in 1963 as a movement of Dhofari tribesmen became, after 1968, the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf, supported from the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen. Sultan Said bin Taimur responded with collective punishment: wells were filled, livestock shot and villages burned, and movement between the mountains and the coast was controlled. After Qaboos deposed his father in 1970 the campaign was redesigned with British advice around amnesty, civil-action teams, drilled wells and government centres, alongside food-denial operations and aerial attack in areas held by the front; populations were concentrated where they could be supplied and watched. Thousands fled west into the PDRY, where the front administered camps and schools; others were resettled around the coastal towns. The war ended in 1975-76 with the front's defeat, and the resettlement pattern permanently changed jebali life. Omani official history treats the period as a renaissance; scholarly accounts of the counter-insurgency emphasise the coercive elements alongside the development programme.
The Omani sultanate, with British and Iranian support, fought a Marxist insurgency in Dhofar and used food denial, aerial attack and controlled resettlement against the mountain population
Contemporary British and Omani estimates put Dhofar at roughly 35,000-50,000 people in the 1960s, split between Salalah and the coastal plain and the jebali herding communities of the mountains; there was no census in Oman before 1993, when Dhofar recorded about 190,000. Food denial, well destruction and aerial attack drove perhaps 10,000-30,000 people into the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, and the counter-insurgency's later phase concentrated jebalis into government-controlled settlements around wells and clinics.
No side published figures. The range reflects estimates in the counter-insurgency literature covering combatants on both sides and civilians killed by air attack, ground operations and the earlier well-poisoning and livestock destruction; the wide span reflects the absence of any count.
British military records and later histories of the campaign document food and water denial, livestock destruction and the burning of settlements in the pre-1970 phase.
Oman, Yemen