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Iranian Militias in Bahrain | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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Protests in Bahrain have usually been marred by violence. (Reuters)


The quiet kingdom on the Arabian Gulf has experienced a tough crisis over six years of chaos, explosions and sabotage. Bahrain has been shouting loud for six years: This is not a revolution nor a peaceful protest, but a riot supported by Iran.

The West, however, only sees what it wants to see. Even worse, the administration of former US President Barack Obama abandoned its closest ally and the Fifth Fleet of the United States Navy – it also blinded itself to the facts.

But the facts are finally being revealed to the western governments– they themselves are admitting, for the first time, that there are criminal acts by which Iran is endeavoring to form militias in Bahrain.

The Washington Post has published documents and interviews with former and current intelligence officials on a detailed training program by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to train its Bahraini members on building advanced bombs and waging guerrilla warfare.

European and American analysts now see a mounting threat since Iranian-funded and -armed cells are emerging. The Washington Post intelligence report also revealed that over the past three years, a huge quantity of modern weapons and military grade bombs have been discovered in Bahrain, all of which have most certainly been made by Iran.

At any rate, what the western intelligence considers as a newly-discovered major surprise has been known and backed with evidence since the eruption of the riots in February 2011. The Iranian exploitation of these acts to picture them as another form of the “Arab Spring” has also been known.

In fact, the Iranian regime had itself made this admission when in March 2016, Senior IRGC Saeed Qassimi openly declared “Bahrain an Iranian province that had broken away from our country due to colonization.” He added that Iran is now a base to support “the revolution in Bahrain”.

The belated western confession that the developments in Bahrain are neither a revolution nor an “Arab Spring” is a new western failure in analyzing, reading and taking decisions in the region.

It is true that the Trump administration is keen on setting things right through imposing sanctions on two Bahraini individuals who have been designated as terrorists on the US terrorism list. The US Department of State pointed out clearly that the designation came after the “escalation of rebel attacks in Bahrain, where Iran provided arms, funds and training for the rebels.”

The Bahraini kingdom has however witnessed serious losses and has been suffering for six years from organizations, associations and western parliaments that depended on the wrong stances of their governments. This led to the acquittal of the criminals and the indictment of the victims and caused unjustified international pressure. This complicated the Bahraini crisis, which was not a revolution, but a riot backed by the Iranian regime’s money and arms.

The West’s confession, although very late, is an opportunity for Bahrain to face all these rights and humanitarian organizations that overlooked all the human rights violations in all the conflict zones around the world and focused only on Bahrain.

It is time to confront these organizations with their own weapons: the intelligence reports that they have long used as an excuse, even if in most cases they were used for political, not rights, purposes.