Bahrain Special: New Martyrs, New Protests, New Crackdown
Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 23:18 | James Miller in EA Middle East and Turkey, Middle East and Iran 
Protesters chanting after police force withdrew from the village of Dair, 15 September
See also Bahrain Feature: Repression Tears Apart a Country
I remember when I read my first article about protests in Bahrain. It was short: in the second paragraph, the author said that the King of Bahrain was going to give the people of his country more than $2650 per family. The conclusion was that it was highly unlikely that protests would catch on.
It's hard to be more wrong.
More than seven months later, and protests are becoming a nightly occurrence. The protest movement has been reinvigorated in recent weeks, partially inspired by Libya, partially inspired by fresh martyrs, entirely dedicated to regain the momentum they had at the start.
On Wednesday, 31 August, 14 year old Ali Jawad was shot through the eye with a tear gas canister that fired directly at civilians by police who were standing less than 30 feet away.
Within a week, protests were growing, specifically in Sitra, the home of young Jawad. On 4 September, we received this video, a man standing in from of a police convoy, refusing to stand down: