Bahrain Leader Quotes

I stood backstage watching the words roll on the teleprompter. In just two months, the world had turned upside down. We’d seen a regime fall in Tunisia, broken from a longtime U.S. ally in Egypt, and intervened in Libya. History, it seemed, was turning in the direction of young people in the streets, and we had placed the United States of America on their side. Where this drama would turn next was uncertain—protests were already rattling a monarch in Bahrain, a corrupt leader in Yemen, a strongman in Syria.

Iran asserts that Bahrain, though across the Gulf, is a “lost province”—a claim made both by the shah and subsequently by the Islamic Republic. In 1981, two years after Khomeini took power, Iran backed a failed coup. Another coup in Bahrain was averted in 1996. Despite the fact that Bahrain had been ruled by the Al Khalifa family since 1783, Iran renewed its claims to the kingdom starting in 2007. Quds Force leader Qassem Soleimani declared that Bahrain was an “Iranian province separated from Iran as a result of colonialism.

The only Arab Spring-related protest in Saudi Arabia occurred in the Eastern Province, where Saudi Shia held large demonstrations in support of ongoing protests by Bahrain’s predominantly Shia population. The Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr emerged as the leader of these Saudi protests