To a casual visitor or a tourist, the port of Khasab at the northern end of the Musandam Peninsula – an exclave of Oman bordered to the south by the United Arab Emirates that had remained largely cut off from Oman and everywhere else until the recent construction of a new coast road – probably looked like almost any other port in the country, or in fact in the region. There were a few hotels and restaurants and cafes and a fairly limited range of shops to cater for visitors to the town, though it was not a major tourist destination like Dubai, Abu Dhabi or Muscat. The harbour was bustling and busy, open boats zipping back-and-forth carrying bags and boxes and bales filled with unidentified products, while other larger vessels, most of them traditional dhows, brown hulled and opulently decorated, their open decks covered with canvas awnings to provide a measure of shade to the people on board, proceeded in a slower and more stately manner.
These were the tourist boats, their cargoes pale-skinned and sweating Europeans on the rare occasions when a cruise ship visited Khasab, but more often chattering families of Arabs, from both Oman and the UAE located further south on the peninsula, all taking a trip to see the Musandam Fjords. Although the resemblance to the dramatic fjordland on Norway’s Atlantic coast is somewhat tenuous, the inlets in the white limestone cliffs, backed by the majestic Hajar Mountains and lapped by the calm turquoise waters of the Strait of Hormuz, are a sufficiently unusual sight to have earned the region the nickname the ‘Norway of Arabia’.
As well as the fjords, the boats also convey tourists to look at the ruined buildings on Telegraph Island, where British engineers built a telegraph repeater station in the 1860s as part of the cable that ran from India to Basra in Iraq. And where it was so hot and so unpleasant to work that folklore claims the expression ‘to go round the bend’ was first coined. This was at first a spoken wish to sail around the top of the peninsula, to go ‘round the bend’ and into the Gulf of Oman to head somewhere cooler and more civilised, but over time the expression morphed into meaning to be driven mad, the insanity being produced by the incessant heat from which there was no escape. There are other explanations for the expression, but that was the one favoured by the local tour guides.
As always, first impressions are only rarely accurate. A visitor to Khasab who did anything more than look at the activity in the harbour and perhaps snap a few pictures with a camera or more likely use his or her mobile phone to capture some colourful images, a person who took the time to see what was actually happening rather than just looking at what was in front of them, would quickly notice something rather odd. Not about the dhows, because they were doing exactly what they appeared to be doing, just taking tourists around the local sights, but about the open boats carrying different cargoes.
What they were doing would depend, strangely, not upon whether or not they were loaded or empty, but upon the time of day, because the activities of the crews of these vessels were almost entirely governed by external factors over which they had no control.
An observer watching the harbour for an entire day would first see the boats arriving, usually in the early morning but always after sunrise, approaching Khasab from the north and carrying a cargo that would probably be unexpected: mainly live sheep and live goats. These animals would be unloaded in the harbour where there were three jetties used exclusively by the crews of these boats, backed by a parking area under an awning that protected the vehicles left there from the worst of the heat of the sun. The animals would be transferred into lorries and driven away, the vehicles eventually travelling along the coast road that leads to the United Arab Emirates.
During the day other trucks would arrive in the harbour and park behind the jetties. They would be loaded with boxes and cartons and packages, most of them unmarked, but some whose contents could perhaps be guessed from the shape of the box or covering, and from the way that the lorry drivers and boatman handled them. Many of these anonymous boxes contained cartons of cigarettes, bulky but lightweight and valuable goods, while the heavier boxes held various types of expensive electronic equipment, principally computers and tablets, mobile phones and cameras, but occasionally a large oblong box hinted at the size of the flat-screen television it contained.
The other obvious peculiarity about the harbour scene at Khasab was that even when the open boats – almost all of them rugged fibreglass hulls about twenty feet or so in length and powered by one or more powerful outboard engines – were loaded and ready to depart, none of them did once the sun had set. Instead, the crews – usually only two or three men – would remain on board their vessels relaxing and trying to get some sleep.
And the reason for all this inactivity was that the trade being followed by the primarily Iranian crews of these vessels was smuggling between Oman and Iran, and they were taking advantage of a convenient loophole in Omani law. The sheep and goats were exported from Iran and legally imported into Oman, the animals destined for the tables of restaurants and the meat markets in the United Arab Emirates or even in Saudi Arabia. The cigarettes and electronic goods were legal exports from Oman, purchased from retailers or wholesalers but destined to be sold on the Iranian black market.
None of which was illegal under Omani legislation, subject only to two conditions: the boats were required to arrive in Khasab after sunrise, and to leave the port before sunset, night-time arrivals or departures not being permitted. But the trade being followed by the smugglers, who were known locally as ‘shooties,’ was completely illegal under Iranian law. And it wasn’t just the law of their country that was a problem.
The Strait of Hormuz is one of the busiest stretches of water in the world because of the large numbers of oil tankers that pass through it on a daily basis, heading into and out of the oil-rich Gulf states, all of which the smugglers had to avoid while they navigated across almost seventy miles of sea without lights or radar or even much in the way of navigational instruments or charts towards Bandar Abbas, their principal destination port in Iran. And waiting for them off the Iranian coast every night would be at least one and probably several armed coastguard and other official vessels operated by the Iranian government, which would be quite likely to open fire on them without warning.
And if that wasn’t enough, because of the hazardous profession being followed by the shooties, and the likelihood of them either smashing into the side of a laden oil tanker because they’d seen it too late to avoid it or getting blown out of the water by gunfire from an Iranian patrol boat, they tended to load as much cargo onto their vessels as they possibly could, so that each successful run across the Strait of Hormuz would bring in the maximum possible profit. But the downside was that the overloading of the boats made them much less manoeuvrable and more vulnerable than they should be and made it more likely that they would not complete their voyages successfully.
There was no sign of the trade disappearing because demand for their smuggled goods in Iran was not just constant but increasing significantly, entirely due to the imposition of additional sanctions against the country by the United States and other nations. This had, somewhat bizarrely, led to a slight relaxation in the anti-smuggling activities of the Iranian authorities, because people in positions of power in Iran wanted the newest phones and the newest cameras and the newest tablets and the newest computers just as much as the ordinary citizens of that economically isolated country.
As a result, many of the officers and men on board the Coast Guard cutters and other vessels had become quite adept at using their radar and their eyes to look out for the shooties heading back towards the secluded beaches and coves around the port of Bandar Abbas, and even more adept at somehow not quite being able to see them in time to stop the vessels. It was situation that seemed to suit all the parties involved fairly well.