Bahrain Intifada (1994)
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The Bahrain Intifada was a Shia uprising against Bahrain's Sunni Al Khalifa monarchy that began roughly two months into John Kiriakou's 1994 Bahrain posting, when a bombing at Bahrain's Ministry of Labor set off what became known as the first Intifada, Arabic for "uprising."

Warning and trigger

Kiriakou learned of brewing unrest from Indian journalist Indira Chand of the Gulf Daily News (later a World Bank spokesperson), who told him, off the phone lines both of them assumed were bugged, that "there is a civil uprising, bubbling just beneath the surface and it's ready to explode." Kiriakou attributes the unrest to Shia unemployment combined with the government importing Sunni foreign workers, including Indians, for jobs, a policy of demographic dilution that had already been fueling resentment. The government responded to unrest with executions, which Kiriakou says had previously been very rare in Bahrain.

Abdul Amir Al-Jamri

Kiriakou identifies Abdul Amir Al-Jamri as the uprising's leader. The Bahraini government first sent police into Shia villages, who found themselves outgunned, and then the military with armored personnel carriers and tanks. Kiriakou had first met Al-Jamri in 1981, on an official CIA trip, when a junior political officer, who later became U.S. Ambassador to Kuwait, brought him along to interview Al-Jamri for a human rights report; Bahrain's prime minister then had that officer expelled from the country for it, telling the ambassador he wanted him out "like today."

By the mid-1990s uprising, Kiriakou says he was literally the only person at the U.S. embassy in Bahrain who had personally met Al-Jamri, per Ambassador David Ransom, "nobody knew as much about Bahrain" as Kiriakou did.

Government crackdown and Saudi anxiety

Kiriakou, serving as the U.S. embassy's human rights officer during the uprising, says the Bahraini government responded with extrajudicial killings, simply disappearing people. He says Saudi Arabia has long feared that unrest among Bahrain's Shia population would spread across the causeway to Saudi Arabia's own Shia-majority Eastern Province, precisely where the kingdom's oil is, driving Riyadh's preemptive instinct to arrest or kill Shia activists there before they could "get ideas about democracy and human rights."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Bahrain Posting (1994,1996)
- Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa
- Bahrain Prime Minister "Mr. 10 Percent"
