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.”[1]
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.”[1] 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.[2]
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.[3] 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.”[4]
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.[5]
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.[6] 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.”[7]