Shia populations and the oil fields is John Kiriakou’s framing of Middle Eastern sectarian politics as a question of geology before it is a question of theology — something he says he wishes everybody who watched or studied the region understood.[1]
The geography
Most of the areas throughout the Middle East that have oil — he specifies Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia — are generally populated by Shia Muslims.[1]
The policy built on it
What follows from that, in his account, is a deliberate and twofold exclusion. The Saudi government, and before the second Gulf War the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein, did everything possible to ensure not only that Shia did not control the oil fields or the oil industry, but that Shia did not benefit at all from the money the oil brought in.[2]
He offers the resulting distribution as the evidence: that is why Saudi Arabia, as wealthy a country as it is, has so many poor people, and why most of those poor people are Shia Muslims.[2]
The regional pattern
Kiriakou describes the same logic operating in Bahrain, a majority-Shia country ruled by a Sunni royal family, where instead of raising the economic status of their own Shia population the rulers imported people and naturalised them so that Sunnis would become the majority.[3]
The pattern, he says, is visible all over the region, though the Saudis are the most heavy-handed about it — “the Saudis are the ones that use the iron fist.” His reduction of the whole arrangement: “the whole name of the game really is just control of the oil and control of the money.”[3][4]