Abdullah bin Khaz'al

Sheikh Abdullah's childhood was spent in his father's palace at Failiya - an imposing structure whose lofty porticos, cool serdabs and spacious halls with their superb Persian carpets and walls of Chaldean alto relieve impressed Sir Arnold Wilson, Sir Percy Cox and other important visitors that he met as a boy. The palace surrounded by palm groves bordering the Karun River near its confluence with the Shatt-al-Arab was almost totally destroyed during the latter Iraq-Iran War.

Broad-minded and cosmopolitan, Sheikh Khaz'al arranged for his son's education by Christian missionaries in Iraq. He also influenced his son as an Anglophile who, in the early years of the 20th century, secured British guarantees of support, without which he had previously had to maintain his independence through constant maneuvering between the Qajar Shahs in Tehran and Ottoman officials in Baghdad and Basra. The British, for their part, valued his assistance in promoting their interests amid international rivalries and tensions.

A young Sheikh Abdullah Bin Khaz'al seated (centre) with a number of his Fedawiya (Bodyguards)

In the First World War, Sheikh Abdullah was too young to serve in the Mesopotamian Campaign, during which, in alliance with his father, British and British Indian troops forced the Ottomans out of Iraq. He did, however, serve as governor of Muhammerah and Abadan, which had begun its conversion into a major oil-producing region soon after oil was first struck there in 1908. In the early 1920s Sheikh Abdullah mediated between the local community and the foreign oil companies and ended several disputes by deporting the workers' dissident Sikh leaders to India while persuading the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) to raise wages.

Seeking a much greater role for Sheikh Abdullah and his other sons, Sheikh Khaz'al sought the throne of Iraq in 1920. In the event, the British imperialists, intent on rewarding the Hashemites for mounting the Arab Revolt with Lawrence of Arabia, installed Faisal I and did nothing to advance Sheikh Khaz'al's ambitions. Nor did Khaz'al benefit from the deposition in 1925 of Ahmad Shah, the last shah of the Qajar Dynasty. Indeed, the British government, far from helping their ally to seize this chance of gaining full independence, instead favored Iran's new strongman, Reza Khan, who placed Sheikh Khaz'als emirate under the central administration. Soon after, Khaz'al was kidnapped by a group of Persian soldiers, header by General Fazlollah Zahedi, and taken to Tehran, where he remained under house arrest in his palace there for 11 years.

Khaz'al along with his sons were too important to be wholly trusted and were forced to live under police surveillance. When Khaz'al was found dead in May 1936, few believed official reports that he had died of heart failure. According to the family, he had been suffocated and then injected at the bridge of his nose to prevent unnatural discoloration. Not long afterwards, Abdullah moved to neighboring Iraq.

After the Second World War, Abdullah finally returned with an armed escort of 20 men to the Khaz'al seat at Failiya and announced his intentions of residing there. But the Iranian authorities, fearing he might incite his fellow Arabs to liberate the province from the central Persian government, surrounded the palace with soldiers. Shots were fired and Abdullah fled to two remote islands in the Shatt al-Arab and thence to Kuwait.

Forty years earlier, his father had been the companion of Kuwait's ruler, Mubarak Al-Sabah, whom he had encouraged to ally with Britain. He owned a palace in Kuwait and much land, some of which he gave to the British as the site for what would later be the British embassy. He also provided the craftsmen and bricks for the construction of the ruler's official Sief Palace.

Despite these connections, Sheikh Abdullah received a lukewarm welcome from the ruler of the day, Sheikh Abdullah Al-Salim, who had no intention of endangering Kuwait's delicate relations with Iran. He did, however, allow the Khaz'al family to settle in Kuwait, where Abdullah prospered as an official in the Kuwait Oil Company and as a businessman involved in Kuwait's lucrative transformation from an obscure port and pearling center into an internationally influential oil state.

Despite his success in Kuwait, the Sheikh Abdullah always missed the land of his birth and never forgave the Iranian government for driving him into exile or for its treacherous treatment of his father.

- 'Sheikh Abdullah Khaz'al' obituary by Alan Rush, The independent 1991.