by Finian Cunningham
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted from Irish Times
March 15, 2011
Manama
There was a defiant mood last night among Bahrain’s pro-democracy protesters who said they viewed the unprecedented intervention of between 2,000 and 6,000 Saudi-led troops as “an illegal occupation”.
Numbers at the protest encampment at Pearl Square in the capital, Manama, swelled well beyond the usual 50,000 to 100,000 that have been gathering every night for the past three weeks calling for the overthrow of the United States-backed monarchy.
The arrival yesterday of troops in convoys from Saudi Arabia came after a weekend of widespread chaos and violence by police and pro-government militias against largely peaceful protesters. Continue reading