Bahrain has launched a sweeping crackdown on Shi’ite Muslim clerics, arresting more than 50 religious figures and stripping dozens of citizens of their nationality, as the Gulf kingdom grapples with the fallout of a war with Iran it never supported.
Authorities accuse the clerics of fostering allegiance to Tehran in the only Gulf state ruled by a Sunni Muslim family but populated mostly by Shi’ites. Bahraini officials have framed the move in existential terms, saying Iran seeks to undermine and ultimately topple the country’s leadership.
“We are confronting an ideology that demands obedience to Iran’s leadership above Bahrain’s sovereign authority,” Lieutenant General Tariq Al Hassan, head of Bahrain’s Public Security agency, told Reuters in an interview.
Between May and June, more than 50 clerics and religious orators were arrested and accused of trying to run a terrorist group that sought to incite rebellion and overthrow the ruling order with help from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Bahrain’s public prosecution said the clerics aimed to do this by promoting their followers’ subordination to Iran’s supreme leader.
The clerics’ relatives and lawyers deny the charges, saying the authorities are trying to criminalise belief. They say their relatives neither sought to overthrow the state nor acted on behalf of Iran.
The crackdown has gone beyond the clergy. Critics, including rights groups, say the arrests and the stripping of citizenship from 69 citizens of Iranian heritage are a new blow to free speech and religious freedom in a country that crushed pro-democracy protests during the Arab Spring in 2011. Around a dozen people have been sentenced to between five and ten years in prison for allegedly expressing support for Iran’s attacks.
On Friday, 20 rights groups, including Human Rights Watch and the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy, released a statement raising allegations of torture, coerced confessions and other due process violations in the case. “This mass prosecution raises serious concerns about religious persecution targeting the religious life and leadership of Bahrain’s Shia community,” the groups said.
A verdict in the clerics’ case is expected on 8 November, and the kingdom is bracing for potential protests.
The crackdown is a sign of how the Iran war has destabilised regional states allied with the United States. When the US and Israel launched the war on 28 February, Tehran responded by raining drones and missiles on neighbouring Gulf states, including Bahrain, home to the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet.
For Bahraini authorities, the strikes were worryingly accurate. Western diplomats and Gulf officials said one hit a hotel shortly after US military personnel arrived there after fleeing their base. Officials were further alarmed by social media posts from some Bahrainis praising attacks seen as targeting US interests after US strikes killed Iran’s supreme leader.
Bahrain denies targeting Shi’ite citizens, “most of whom are law-abiding and loyal citizens,” Al Hassan said. But divisions are deepening, particularly among some Shi’ite Muslims who say they are being oppressed for their beliefs. “They are directly targeting Shi’ites in the country and anyone who criticises the Americans or the Israelis for the war they have launched,” said a relative of one of the clerics on trial, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The crackdown also reverses a recent trend towards detente. The government freed hundreds of prisoners jailed for political activity through royal pardons in 2024, and the same year Bahrain and Iran began talks to restore diplomatic relations, severed since 2016.
Iran’s UN mission did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Note: this article is based on Reuters reporting, including an interview with Bahrain’s head of public security; some claims, including the allegations of torture and coerced confessions, rest on single sources and have not been independently verified.
Sources: Reuters — “Iran war spurs crackdown on clerics in tiny Gulf state Bahrain” (6 November 2026), https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iran-war-spurs-crackdown-clerics-tiny-gulf-state-bahrain-2026-11-06/
