Bahrain, a microcosmsm of Middle East contradictions

Bahrain is torn asunder, ripped apart by "friends" in the Gulf Cooperation Council and by the United States and  Great Britain, by its own arrogant mistreatment of human beings who worship in ways distasteful to Saudi, to religious zealots who worship the way the Islamic State worships (and the way Saudi Arabia warships).

Bahrain is a majority Shiite country, and some of  its Sunni people pent many years in Iran.  None gives allegiance to the Iranian Ayatollah, yet the West's propaganda machine persists in blaming Iran for all problems of its own making.

The Royal Family  --

-- stiff, out of touch 

(though staunch football supporters) --

Bahrain itself is a tiny island in the Persian Gulf, with Saudi Arabia to the east an Qatar to the southwest:

Bahrain Map, Flag. Capital Manama

This map is accompanied by this text,

which seems accurate:

The Kingdom of Bahrain is an independent Arab nation in western Asia, part of the region known as the Middle East. It is made up of 36 islands on the western side of the Persian Gulf, between Saudi Arabia to the east and Qatar to the west. The main island, also known as Bahrain, is home to the country’s capital and largest city, Manama.
More than 60 percent of Bahrain’s population is native-born, in contrast to the populations of other Persian Gulf states such as Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, where foreign-born inhabitants outnumber the native population. Bahrain also differs from its neighbors in that the number of followers of Shia Islam in the country is more than double that of the adherents of Sunni Islam, which is the largest group of Muslims worldwide. The Sunnis control the country’s government, however.
In the 1930s Bahrain became the first Arab state in the Persian Gulf region to develop an oil-based economy, but by the early 1980s its oil fields were mostly depleted. However, the country had prepared for this change by investing in other industries, and its economy continues to prosper.

The many contradictory forces tearing at Bahrain are detailed in the nAl Monitor news article below.  The article is not easy to follow if you are not familiar with the names, and is worth the trouble of reading with care, if you would see a part of the many contradictory forces at work today in the Middle East, and understand Obama's courageous, reasonable restraint (assuming that  is, for unstated reasons, that it is good to befriend Saudi Arabia).

gulf PULSEنبض الخليج

Shiite Bahraini men sit on a wall with graffiti that reads ''People want self-determination" as they attend a rally held by the Al-Wefaq opposition party, in the village of Boori, south of Manama, Oct. 14, 2011, to mark the eight-month anniversary of the February 14 uprising.  (photo by REUTERS/Hamad I Mohammed)

What Bahrain’s opposition crackdown means for country’s Brotherhood

On the heels of a Bahraini court suspending Al-Wefaq for the Shiite society’s alleged role in creating "an environment for terrorism, extremism and violence,” Bahrain’s rulers delivered a powerful message June 20 by annulling Ayatollah Sheikh Isa Qassim’s Bahraini citizenship.

Author Giorgio CafieroPosted June 27, 2016

Following five years of stalemate, the Bahraini leadership sees no purpose in engaging the Shiite opposition and instead favors eliminating Shiites who call for the government’s dissolution from political life in the island. By excluding popular political groups from Bahrain’s political arena amid a wider crackdown, however, there are risks of militancy gaining broader power and appeal within the Shiite opposition.

Throughout the past five years, Manama has grown increasingly reliant on Gulf Arab and Western allies. The Shiite-led Arab Spring uprising unsettled Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) leaders fearful of Bahrain aligning with Tehran following a popular Shiite revolution. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were quick to deploy ground forces to the island by March 2011 to help Bahrain's rulers quash the uprising.

Manama’s participation in the US-led military campaign against the Islamic State (IS) and the kingdom’s “pricey PR push” on K Street seem to have further consolidated Bahrain’s alliance with Washington, despite some diplomatic spats over the past five years. Despite the Department of Defense’s congressionally mandated contingency plans for relocating the Navy’s 5th Fleet, Washington is unlikely to undergo the massive undertaking of moving the Persian Gulf’s most powerful naval force to another facility. The United Kingdom’s plans for a permanent base in Mina Salman, Bahrain, announced in 2014, underscore Manama’s important role in London’s strategic return “East of Suez” 40 years after the Royal Navy’s official departure from the Gulf. 

Unquestionably, allies in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Washington and London have prevented the Al Khalifa rulers from being pressured into negotiating a resolution to the kingdom’s crisis.

The king’s Sunni Islamist support networks

The ruling family’s ties with the Bahraini Muslim Brotherhood’s political wing, Minbar, and the more conservative Salafi society, Asala, to counterbalance the Shiite opposition has been another pillar of the regime’s strategy for standing strong since 2011.

Formed in 1984, Minbar’s platform reflects Bahrain’s liberal (by GCC standards) social environment, particularly with respect to women’s rights, although the group has close connections with the Muslim Brotherhood’s Kuwaiti branch. Many of Minbar’s members belong to the Hawala tribe, Sunni Arabs who migrated to Persia before returning to the Arabian Peninsula’s eastern shore. The Bahraini Muslim Brothers are middle-class professionals, many of whom are teachers and police officers.

Despite pressure from other GCC states, Manama has not designated Minbar a “terrorist” organization. The Sunni Islamist society not only continues operating publicly, but Bahrain’s Royal Court and Islamic banking sector reportedly fund Minbar. In exchange, Bahrain’s Muslim Brothers have backed the government’s post-2011 crackdown. In February 2013, for example, Minbar boycotted the national dialogue to protest what the island’s Muslim Brothers saw as unacceptable Shiite “silence” on violence plaguing the uprising’s two-year anniversary. At times, Minbar has even criticized the ruling family for responding too softly to Shiite dissent.

Despite Bahrain’s politically active Sunni Islamists supporting the regime during 2011, a growing number have made their own demands since that crisis erupted. In fact, Shiite protesters shared some of these demands such as releasing political prisoners and liberalizing Bahrain politically. Concerned about the possibility of Sunni opposition materializing, the state implemented electoral reforms to redraw boundaries before the 2014 elections. Consequently, Minbar and Asala only retained a combined three seats in the National Assembly’s Council of Representatives — down from five. Additionally, although Al-Wefaq was the main target of legislation passed last month to ban mixing religion with politics, the law also bodes poorly for Minbar and Asala — Bahrain’s second- and third-largest Islamist factions, respectively, after Al-Wefaq.

The influence of extremist ideologies in the kingdom’s Sunni communities is unsettling, particularly in light of numerous Bahraini Sunnis pledging allegiance to IS. As of January 2015, at least a dozen Bahrainis had joined Sunni militant organizations in Syria and Iraq. After King Hamad revoked Omar Bozboun’s Bahraini citizenship for joining IS, he responded by threatening to “enter Bahrain with blazing guns and behead the king.”

Turki al-Binali, a Salafi cleric hailing from a wealthy Sunni family allied with the Al Khalifas, is now IS’ leading preacher. Prior to leaving Bahrain in 2013, he held a rally in front of the US Embassy in Manama with his followers holding pictures of Osama bin Laden while waving al-Qaeda flags. Two and a half years after Binali left the kingdom, a Bahraini court tried him in absentia and nearly two dozen other Bahrainis on charges of seeking to topple the Manama regime and create an IS branch in the island. One family member, Mohamed Isa al-Binali, was an officer in the Interior Ministry overseeing Shiite inmates in Jaw Prison before defecting to IS in 2014.

There are several other reasons why Bahrain appears to be a logical destination for the group’s agenda. These include IS offshoots waging acts of terrorism in neighboring Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, the presence of many Shiite Muslims and non-Muslim expatriates, the 5th Fleet being stationed in Bahrain, Manama’s role in the Washington-led military campaign against the group in Syria and the island’s reputation as the “brothel of the Gulf.”

Another threat to the nation’s stability stems from Manama granting Bahraini citizenship to Jordanian, Pakistani and Yemeni Sunnis to alter the country’s sectarian balance. Opposition voices in Bahrain maintain that these "naturalized Bahrainis" are Sunni “fundamentalists” who harbor anti-Shiite sentiments. As these non-Bahrainis earn their citizenship through service in Bahrain’s security apparatus, IS infiltration into the state’s military and police is a risk.

As underscored by the past several months of violent attacks targeting Bahrain’s security forces with improvised explosive devices and Molotov cocktails, the crackdown is failing to resolve the kingdom’s crisis. If the cancellation of Qassim’s citizenship and the court’s suspension of Al-Wefaq lead to the exacerbation of violence, the government will be forced to address an increasingly dire security crisis on top of managing social risks stemming from austerity measures amid an era of cheap oil — itself a contributing factor to the island’s sectarian issues.

As sectarian temperatures rise in the Gulf with Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah officials harshly condemning Manama’s annulment of Qassim’s citizenship and Iraqi Shiite forces retaking Fallujah from IS, the regime’s relationship with Minbar will be an important variable to observe as the Saudi-aligned monarchy seeks to maintain Sunni rule in a Shiite-majority island.

Looking ahead, will Minbar remain loyal to the Al Khalifas and continue viewing the crackdown as a safeguard against a Shiite takeover? Or will discontent over the Sunni Islamist society’s declining political influence cost the regime a key domestic ally? Will the regime continue seeing Minbar as a domestic ally against the Shiite opposition or as a gateway to IS? 

And see Bahrain: Analyzing Inequities Between Sunnis and Shiites

ahrain is again in the news this week. The country and Saudi Arabia are discussing acloser political union—with the obvious aim of safeguarding Sunni control in a Shiite majority country. Meanwhile, Shiite activists burned tires and blocked roads in a protest against detention policies.

Bahrain’s crisis has many causes: the Middle East’s wider Shiite-Sunni rivalry; the region’s longstanding Persian-Arab rivalry; ideas released during the Arab Spring; rising political aspirations from years of watching satellite television.

But the key driver is the horizontal inequities (i.e. inequalities between culturally formed groups) that exacerbate the fault line between the Shiites and Sunnis within the kingdom. Shiite demands may not all be reasonable, but their relative disadvantage in economic, social, and political spheres feed dissatisfaction, and promote instability. Reducing at least some of these inequities is crucial to reducing the instability, which otherwise is likely to fester for years to come.

Bahrain is a very tiny place—600,000 citizens (and about a million people in all) live on one archipelago of thirty-three islands. Shiites are in the majority, but no one really knows by how much. Although it is generally assumed (not least by the media) that the Shiites make up 65 to 75 percent of the population, one recent independent studyconcludes that they now make up less than 60 percent—and the share is dropping steadily. The government’s decade-long program of naturalizing Arab and non-Arab Sunnis from Yemen, Syria, Jordan and Pakistan, mostly for work in the police and military, is adding as many as 100,000 Sunnis citizens to the populace. The below map shows where each group lives.

Beneath this simple division lies a much more complex society comprised of groups and subgroups with different interests and agendas. There are Shiite Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula who have traditionally worked as farmers, pearl divers, and tradesmen; Shiites with Iranian roots who tend to be professionals and intellectuals; Sunnis from Arabia, from Iran, and “tribals” who have distant links to the region’s royal families. And then there are the more recent Sunni arrivals. Recent events, however, have polarized the country into a more rigid sectarian split.

Sunnis—especially those linked to the royal family—hold a disproportionate share of political power and have gained disproportionately from the country’s natural resource wealth. . . . 

Random images of official response to Shiite protests

Saud- United Arab Emirates split; Saudi Arabia's intransigence; battle for Aleppo

The article reprinted here is especially interesting for this quotation:

 "It's the only game in town," says Yousef Al Otaiba, the United Arab Emirates' ambassador to Washington, of Kerry's diplomatic effort. "I don't see any other strategy for now."

The quotation suggests a split in the Gulf Cooperation Council ranks. I doubt hat Saudi Arabia agrees with a Kerry's cease fire efforts.

Will the United Arab Emirates use United States' mercenaries to train Syrian Sunni fighters in its name? The United Arab Emirates likely does't have the capability to train anyone on anything without the United States' mercenary help.

The article could do without the neoconic carping on the president’s “past mistakes in Syria.”  No sensible alternatives have been proposed, given Congressional Republicans’ recalcitrance. But blaming congressional Republicans isn’t a neoconic thing to do and the article's author is neoconic.

The basic problem in Syria is that the Saudi will not give up their billion dollar support for Salafi Jihadist fighters, their main hope of establishing a Wahhabist state in Syria (a horror for the Syrian people); nor their determination to keep Iran from transporting oil to Europe through Syria. 

The United States Congress is also unwilling to give up its decades-long effort to bottle up Iranian oil, at Saud bidding.  The president does not share that fading illusion and still must block the IP Pipeline in spite of  harming relations with Pakistan more.

A Pivotal Moment in a Tangled War

By David Ignatius

February 19, 2016

WASHINGTON -- Blaming President Obama for his past mistakes in Syria may be satisfying, and is largely deserved, but it's not a policy. This is the most complicated battlefield the world has seen in decades, and the next moves by the U.S. and its allies have to be deliberate, and carefully considered.

     The U.S. should move forward with the cease-fire process begun by Secretary of State John Kerry a week ago in Munich. Yes, it's a long shot, and woefully dependent on Russian "goodwill." But it offers a chance to reduce the suffering of the Syrian people and save lives, and it should be pursued awhile longer. If diplomacy fails, what comes next will be much worse for everyone.

     "It's the only game in town," says Yousef Al Otaiba, the United Arab Emirates' ambassador to Washington, of Kerry's diplomatic effort. "I don't see any other strategy for now."

     If Russia is sabotaging cease-fire hopes by continuing to bomb Syrian civilians, then the U.S. and its allies should focus international indignation on Moscow. Yes, Kerry may have been overly optimistic in making the Munich deal, but the Russians signed it -- and they should be held accountable if it fails.

     In the Syrian nightmare, even small steps forward are notable. So this week's move to send relief to five besieged areas around Damascus shouldn't be dismissed. This humanitarian assistance was part of the Munich agreement, and U.S. officials say the aid convoys moved into some of the towns on Wednesday. It's a fragile, first step toward de-escalation, but it's a positive sign.

     The "cessation of hostilities" that Kerry negotiated on paper was supposed to begin Friday, but it won't. That's partly because the Russians have continued their assaults on rebel areas. It's also partly because the opposition hasn't yet signaled clearly that it's willing to stand down. Given the opposition's weakness, this reluctance to embrace a truce is understandable, but it's wrong. Any chance to reduce violence and create space for political discussion should be seized.

     The battlefield around Aleppo is a mess -- a crosshatch of different combatants and foreign forces. Within a small area are Syrian regime forces backed by Russia and Iran; Kurdish rebel forces backed by the U.S.; Turkish forces that are shelling the U.S.-backed Kurds; Arab rebel fighters supported by the CIA and Saudi intelligence; Jabhat al-Nusra fighters allied with al-Qaeda; and Islamic State fighters, who want to kill all of the above.

     A full cease-fire in this landscape is impossible right now -- and not just because Kerry has been too trusting of the Russians. The combatants have to sort themselves out. Rebels will vote with their feet whether to ally with Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State. Saudi Arabia and other Arab patrons will have to lean hard on "moderate" rebels to pull them toward the cease-fire group and away from the terrorists.

     If the Russians keep bombing the rebels around Aleppo, willy-nilly, that will sabotage any hope of a truce. Here again, blame Moscow if it blocks de-escalation.

     Going forward, the U.S. needs more military leverage to match Russia. That may be coming, with Saudi Arabia and the UAE offering to send special forces into Syria, under overall U.S. command. Details are still being discussed, but the UAE appears willing to train Sunni fighters inside Syria -- helping to fill a hole in U.S. strategy. These forces might be part of an eventual strike against Raqqa, the Islamic State's self-proclaimed capital in eastern Syria.

     The U.S. campaign against the Islamic State continues, mostly invisibly. The key U.S. allies have been fighters from the Syrian Kurdish group known as the YPG, which has now been rebranded as the "Syrian Democratic Forces." This week, about 6,000 fighters moved to attack al-Shaddadi, a town about 50 miles east of Raqqa. This force included about 2,500 Arabs. Overall, the SDF umbrella group now numbers about 40,000, of which 7,000 are Arabs.

     The Syrian Kurds have been the toughest and most effective fighters in this conflict. Their success seems to have panicked Turkey, which claims the Syrian Kurds are terrorists. The Turks have been shelling YPG positions in northwest Syria -- even as these fighters (with quiet U.S. support) have been attacking Islamic State positions near Aleppo. What a crazy war -- with a NATO member (Turkey) attacking America's best allies in Syria (the Kurds)!

     The Syrian conflict is at a critical, delicate moment. A miscalculation by Russia or Turkey could be catastrophic. It's never too late for the U.S. to do the right thing -- which is to build, carefully, the political and military framework for a new Syria.

(c) 2016, Washington Post Writers Group