Bahrain Massacre: The World Bears Witness In Horror And Disgust..

When Bahrain's al-Khalifa royal family is overthrown, I hope the trial is broadcast internationally. Their response to their people's peaceful demonstrations have sealed their fate, and their subjects have shown more courage than the royal family could ever muster. Bahrain protesters didn't run away. They faced the bullets head-on. Excerpts, doubling as future testimony at the World Court:

"Massacre – it's a massacre," the doctors were shouting. Three dead. Four dead. One man was carried past me on a stretcher in the emergency room, blood spurting on to the floor from a massive bullet wound in his thigh.
A few feet away, six nurses were fighting for the life of a pale-faced, bearded man with blood oozing out of his chest. "I have to take him to theatre now," a doctor screamed. "There is no time – he's dying!"
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Eyewitness testimony from a hospital orderly at the demonstration..
"We decided to walk to the hospital because we knew there was a demonstration. Some of us were carrying tree branches as a token of peace which we wanted to give to the soldiers near the square, and we were shouting 'peace, peace. There was no provocation – nothing against the government. Then suddenly the soldiers started shooting. One was firing a machine gun from the top of a personnel carrier. There were police but they just left as the soldiers shot at us. But you know, the people in Bahrain have changed. They didn't want to run away. They faced the bullets with their bodies."
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The demonstration at the hospital had already drawn thousands of Shia protesters – including hundreds of doctors and nurses from all over Manama, still in their white gowns – to demand the resignation of the Bahraini Minister of Health, Faisal Mohamed al-Homor, for refusing to allow ambulances to fetch the dead and injured from Thursday morning's police attack on the Pearl Square demonstrators.

But their fury turned to near-hysteria when the first wounded were brought in yesterday. Up to 100 doctors crowded into the emergency rooms, shouting and cursing their King and their government as paramedics fought to push trolleys loaded with the latest victims through screaming crowds.
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Five ambulances sent to the street – yesterday's victims were shot down opposite a fire station close to Pearl Square – were stopped by the army. Moments later, the hospital discovered that all their mobile phones had been switched off. Inside the hospital was a doctor, Sadeq al-Aberi, who was himself badly hurt by the police when he went to help the wounded on Thursday morning.
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Why has the royal family of Bahrain allowed its soldiers to open fire at peaceful demonstrators? To turn on Bahraini civilians with live fire within 24 hours of the earlier killings seems like an act of lunacy.

But the heavy hand of Saudi Arabia may not be far away. The Saudis are fearful that the demonstrations in Manama and the towns of Bahrain will light equally provocative fires in the east of their kingdom, where a substantial Shia minority lives around Dhahran and other towns close to the Kuwaiti border. Their desire to see the Shia of Bahrain crushed as quickly as possible was made very clear at Thursday's Gulf summit here, with all the sheikhs and princes agreeing that there would be no Egyptian-style revolution in a kingdom which has a Shia majority of perhaps 70 per cent and a small Sunni minority which includes the royal family.
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And the stakes here are high. This is the first serious insurrection in the wealthy Gulf states – more dangerous to the Saudis than the Islamists who took over the centre of Mecca more than 30 years ago – and Bahrain's al-Khalifa family realise just how fraught the coming days will be for them. A source which has always proved reliable over many years told me that late on Wednesday night, a member of the al-Khalifa family – said to be the Crown Prince – held a series of telephone conversations with a prominent Shia cleric, the Wifaq Shia party leader, Ali Salman, who was camping in Pearl Square. The Prince apparently offered a series of reforms and government changes which he thought the cleric had approved. But the demonstrators stayed in the square. They demanded the dissolution of parliament. Then came the police.
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A doctor who gave his name as Hussein stopped me leaving the emergency room because he wanted to explain his anger. "The Israelis do this sort of thing to the Palestinians – but these are Arabs shooting at Arabs,".. "This is the Bahraini government doing this to their own people. I was in Egypt two weeks ago, working at the Qasr el-Aini hospital – but things are much more fucked up here."

The Shia make up 70% of Bahrain's population, controlled by the Sunni Royal Family. As you can see by this 2009 article, Shia dominated Iran has an affinity for Shia-majority-but-ruled-by-minority-Sunni Bahrain. Now that Iran has ships cruising the Suez Canal, is it beyond the scope of possibility that Iran might come to the aid of the Bahrainis and do a little ass kickin' on the Bahraini military, if the opportunity arises? How would the Saudis' react to such provocation, or more accurately, how quickly would this crisis escalate to a regional inferno? Note: Bahrain is also home to America's 5th Fleet, so the U.S. is involved with this uprising whether we like it or not. "On the one hand, Bahrain is a flash point between the United States and Iran," he told CNN. On the other, it's "a flash point between Saudi Arabia and Iran."

The potential for more bloodshed is almost assured. It's really a matter of how this plays out, and how the three outside interests proceed. This very well could be the country that turns this regional unrest into something much, much bigger. And the actions of the bloodthirsty thugs who(for now) rule Bahrain have inflamed their people and won't be forgotten.