Sheikh Abdullah Bin Khaz'al was the son of Sheikh Khaz'al of Mohammerah (later named Khorramshahr), overlord of the Muhaisin tribal confederation and Emir of the Oil rich Emirate of Mohammerah, today part of the Iranian province of Khuzistan. He led the 1945 movement "The revolt of Sheikh Abdullah Bin Khaz'al" against the Iranian government, but failed.

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 whom he met as a boy. The palace surrounded by palm groves bordering the Karun River near its confluence with the Shatt-al-Arab, stood at the vortex of the Iraq-Iran war and was almost totally destroyed.

Broadminded 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 manoeuvrings between the Qajar Shahs in Tehran and Turkish officials in Baghdad and Basra. The British, for their part, valued his assistance in promoting their interests amid keen international rivalries and tensions between local Sunni and Shia Muslims and hostile groups of Turks, Kurds, Armenians, Arabs, and Persians.

In the First World War, Sheikh Abdullah was too young to serve in the Mesopotamian campaign through which, in alliance with his father, British and British Indian troops forced the Ottomans of of the Turkish province of Iraq, thus laying the basis of today's independent Iraqi state. 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 1920's Sheikh Abdullah mediated between the local community and the foreign oil companies and ended several disputes by deporting the workers' dissident Sikh Leaders to Indian 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, 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 of Persia's Qajar dynasty. Indeed, the British government, far from helping their ally to seize this chance of gaining full independence, switched their favours to 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.

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Wikipedia