TIME: The 45 helmeted men, armed with rifles, their faces masked, came for Ibrahim Sharif at 2 a.m. on Friday. They hopped the fence and entered his home, carted him off to jail — or Saudi Arabia — no one's really sure. "They were ringing the bell and shouting 'open, open, open,'" the dissident's wife, Fareeda, told TIME later that day. "Ibrahim told them to lower their guns, to calm down. They took him anyway. It took less than 10 minutes." The vans outside, she said, sported the insignia of Bahrain's national security forces.
Sharif, the leader of the Bahrain's opposition Waad party, was among several key anti-government activists arrested in a wave of pre-dawn raids on Thursday and Friday. At 4 a.m., on Friday, shortly after the raid at Sharif's home, the Waad headquarters was set on fire. All that remains of the two-story office building are charred walls and office furniture, gutted meeting rooms, giant shards of glass littering the floor. In a subsequent press conference, Foreign Minister Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa, dismissed the blaze as a random act of arson. But it comes as the regime of his cousin, King Hamad bin Isa al Khalifa, stages an increasing ferocious crackdown against the Shi'ite majority, a campaign abetted by the unprecedented prescence of Saudi Arabian troops sent in to preserve the Sunni monarchy.
Until the end of last week, the political opposition had been rapidly been gaining steam, and support. Then, on March 11, the government let lose with the first of a series of increasingly ferocious responses. Now, Waad party leaders and even younger activists fear for their safety. On Friday morning, TIME received a text message from a protest organizer who said he had been warned that a crackdown on youth was underway. He said he had not left his [home?] for more than a day. "The streets are not safe," he texted, adding that his bank accounts had been frozen, phone tapped and every move monitored by police. » | Karen Leigh | SITRA | Friday, March 18, 2011
