[citation needed] Throughout his career, Ubayd Allah seemed to have been overly obsequious, a little too eager to please the whims of the well-born lords of Damascus, while simultaneously exhibiting a harsh and almost vicious disdain of those below him, particularly non-Arabs.
At Ubayd Allah's suggestion, in 726, the Caliph Hisham began dispatching Arab regiments drawn from the Qaysid (or 'Nejdi') tribes of central Arabia, partly in order to get the more troublesome Qaysid regiments out of the vicinity of Damascus, partly to counterbalance the local Arab soldiers already in Fustat and Alexandria (drawn from Kalbid or 'Yemenite' stock of south Arabian tribes) lest they be used as a power base for ambitious local nobles against the central Umayyad government.
[citation needed] Ubayd Allah ibn al-Habhab found the westerly domains of the Caliphate in disorder and the treasury thin following the mismanagement and reverses of the preceding years.
[citation needed] In 740, Ubayd Allah dispatched Habib ibn Abi Ubayda al-Fihri at the head of an Arab expedition across the water to Sicily in what was possibly the first attempt at a full-scale invasion of the island (rather than a mere raid).
Contravening Islamic law and the 718 edicts of the Caliph Umar II, Ubayd Allah reinstated some of the extraordinary dhimmi taxation (the jizyah and kharaj) and slave-tributes on the Muslim Berber population, provoking immense opposition.
Seeking to satisfy the luxurious tastes of the nobles of Damascus, Ubayd Allah sent his officials in the relentless pursuit of the highly prized wool of unborn Merino lambs, seizing (and destroying) entire flocks—the livelihoods of many Berber communities—just to gather the handful he could dispatch back to Syria.
[citation needed] Ubayd Allah immediately dispatched orders to Habib ibn Abi Ubayda al-Fihri to break off the Sicilian invasion and return the Ifriqiyan army to Africa.
[citation needed] After a few skirmishes with the Arab vanguard in the outskirts of Tangiers, the Berber rebels decided to depose Maysara and reorganize their forces under the Zenata chieftain Khalid ibn Hamid al-Zanati.
The main Ifriqiyan force under Habib ibn Abi Ubayda arrived too late to prevent the massacre, and retreated to Tlemcen, which had in the meantime itself been raised to revolt by Sufrite activists.
Caliph Hisham, shocked at the news, dismissed Ubayd Allah in February, 741 and began preparations to dispatch a large eastern Arab army under a new governor, Kulthum ibn Iyad al-Qushayri to crush the Berber rebellion.