The Gulf Daily News
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The Gulf Daily News is Bahrain's English-language newspaper, and in John Kiriakou's account of his 1994,96 posting it supplied the contact who explained the country's politics to him.

Two months after his arrival a bomb went off at the Ministry of Labour. Kiriakou telephoned Indira Chand, an Indian journalist at the paper whom he had met at a party and liked, she now lives in Washington and is a spokesperson at the World Bank. She would not discuss it on the telephone, because both her line and his were bugged, and asked to meet.

What she told him was that a civil uprising was bubbling just beneath the surface and ready to explode: the Shia would not take the situation any longer. Her explanation of the target was economic. "When you and literally everybody in your family is unemployed and then they bring in Indians to take the jobs, you're going to move on the Ministry of Labour."

That was the beginning of what was called the first Intifada, intifada meaning uprising in Arabic, which, Kiriakou says, got bad quickly and worse over the two years of his tour.

The grievance she described was the demographic policy behind it: Bahrain had a Sunni royal family ruling a country that was then about seventy-five per cent Shia, and the royal family was granting citizenship to Sunni Muslims from Syria, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. The Shia objected that they were being deliberately diluted. Kiriakou's assessment decades later is that the policy worked: the official Sunni,Shia split is now about even.

See also

- Bahrain Intifada (1994)
- Bahrain Posting (1994,1996)
- Abdul Amir al-Jamri
